


flame that came for me

by Luthor



Category: Jane the Virgin (TV)
Genre: AU, Attempted Murder, Attempted Suicide, Blood and Violence, Character Death (but not in this timeline), Cheating, F/F, Family Drama, Forced Marriage, Forced Sterilisation, Implied Forced Marriage, Implied Underaged Non-Con/Dub-Con, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Torture, Mentions of Alcohol Abuse, Mild Gore, Murder, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Poisoning, Roisa Fic Week 2018, Succubus Rose, Suicidal Ideation, Supernatural AU - Freeform, Witchcraft, roisaficweek2k18
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-09
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-07 06:48:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 32,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15213506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luthor/pseuds/Luthor
Summary: RoisaFicWeek2k18: "Luisa’s thoughts take her back to the first time Rose had shared her bed as her lover. She had known, even then, that she would burn for what they had."The Solano family go on their first family vacation in years. Unbeknown to them, it will be their last.OR:Emilio takes his wife, his kids, and his granddaughters to a little old Italian village, and it could not go worse for him if he'd tried.





	1. Holiday

**Author's Note:**

> Well, I didn't think I'd manage to pull this fic together in two(+) weeks, but here we are.
> 
> Firstly, I'd just like to say a HUGE thank you to [Ims0s0rry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ims0s0rry) for encouraging me to write this fic, and then for all the help with the beta-work that came after. I genuinely don't think I'd have written this without our patchy time-zone conversations, so thank you so much!! 
> 
> Secondly, I want to warn you now that this fic will get a little dark. I will add warnings as and when they appear, so please keep an eye on the additional tags as they're updated (but, spoiler: it has a happy ending). 
> 
> I have the next six chapters already written, and the final chapter is in the works, so I should be able to get these out on the relevant fic-week-dates. As always, feedback is so greatly appreciated. If you can drop me a comment, no matter how big or how small, I will treasure you forever. :)

Luisa steps out of a rented car into humid, mountainous mist.

It’s been exactly seven years since she last stepped foot on Italian soil, and she has missed it. It’s cool for early summer and already growing dark, and Luisa’s body aches from the flight and the long drive out here. Her father’s list of private estates includes many grander properties in much more central locations than the remote manor nestled into the north-west Italian mountains, where they now find themselves, and as such Luisa has never visited this particular property before today.

She remembers their last family vacation sparingly, like an old VHS tape with dust on the film, cutting to static between intervals of family arguments and boozy make-ups. In truth, Luisa has her reservations about this holiday, but her father had insisted. They’ve drifted too far away, he’d told Luisa, and only Luisa, when she’d questioned him. They needed to reconnect.

Behind her, she hears a car door open and close. Rafael steps into view beside her, drawing his sunglasses down to take in the manor. It’s an aged stone building with obvious reconstructions and renovations; its hard edges and spires make it look particularly bleak against the lush landscape surrounding it, and Luisa hears her own uncertainty in her brother’s sigh.

“Well, at least there are no neighbours,” Rafael says, fishing his phone from his pocket. “And, no signal. Great.”

“I think that was the point,” Luisa muses as she takes in the imposing manor. It would look great against dark, storming sky, she thinks, although the thought doesn’t exactly warm her. “At least, this way, dad won’t be able to spend the entire holiday trying to micro-manage his work over the phone.”

She spares a glance at Rafael, who looks dejectedly down at his phone screen, and smirks.

Their father won’t be the only one, she thinks.

Finally, tucking his phone away, Rafael returns to the car and the twin girls still seated within the back. Luisa half-listens to him answering questions from Ellie and Anna as he helps them out of their car seats, but there’s something about the manor that holds her fast in place. Whether it’s the mountain mist surrounding it, or the eerie grey sky above, it captures Luisa’s attention the way horror movies tend to, even when they frighten her.

She wants to look on, to delve deeper in, to see what happens next.

Seeing the manor from this distance, she wants nothing more than to unlock the door, step inside, trace her fingers along the old stone. She’s never been here before, of that she’s certain, but there’s something familiar about the building that she can’t put her finger on. Luisa shakes her thoughts when a small hand takes her own; she looks down at Ellie and returns her smile.

“Shall we go take a look inside?” she asks, and Ellie grins and nods her head.

Behind her, helping Rafael with their bags, Luisa overhears from Anna, “daddy, this place is creepy.”

Luisa climbs the old steps with ease, but her grip on Ellie’s hand momentarily tightens. They’re steeper than what they’re used to, and Luisa frets that it’ll cause an issue for the girls. At the top of the steps, Luisa draws out her copy of the keys to the building and unlocks the door. She feels as though it should be an old, iron key – heavy in her hand, loud on the ring against many others; the image is easily conjured within her mind – and there’s something both unsatisfying and _wrong_ about the modern locks.

The door swings open, regardless, to a darkened hallway.

A sense of déjà vu grips Luisa as she stares out into the unending dimness.

The manor smells like cold stone and old dust after a hard rain, and while Luisa may never have set foot here before, the scent makes her feel nostalgic. While she’s not afraid, not really even unnerved, the sensation gives her pause. She tries to place the manor in her memories, in her childhood holidays, thinking perhaps her father had brought her here once before when she was very young.

“Zia Luisa?” Ellie tugs on her hand. “Let’s go inside.”

“Right,” Luisa agrees, shaking herself.

When she reaches for a light switch, Luisa half expects that the electricity will fail them, but the hallway lights up under a dim glow to reveal an open entrance and a winding stone staircase against the back wall. There are doors on either side of the main entrance, both closed, and Ellie and Luisa make it no further than the centre of the room. While the building has had fairly modern renovations and repairs, it carries a sense of antiquity so strong that Luisa feels as though they’re trespassing just by being there.

“We’re staying here?” Ellie asks, and her voice carries the faintest echo.

Luisa can’t help but wonder just how long it’s really been since these stone walls last held a family.

“Yeah,” she says, and smiles at Ellie when she notices the girl’s caution. “But, don’t worry, it’ll look much better when we open all of these curtains. Shall we go find our rooms?” She tries to make her voice sound encouraging, but Ellie only shakes her head. She peers back the way they’d came, through the open door, and untangles her hand from Luisa’s.

“I’m going to help daddy.”

Luisa watches her go from the doorway, mindful of the steps. She turns back inside once Ellie has cleared them without accident.  

Alone, the entrance way carries a different feeling than before. Luisa treads carefully, purposefully, making sure that her heels make as little noise as possible against the stone floors. She feels almost like if she makes too much of a racket, she will awaken something that’s been waiting here for as long as the old stone foundations. It’s a bizarre idea, one that makes her huff a breath at herself, but it’s with equal caution that she climbs the staircase to the first floor.

Natural light filters dimly through the windows, but Luisa turns lights on, regardless, as she makes her way through to the upper floor. Her tour of the upper level comes to a pause as she rounds a corner on the landing, and comes face-to-face with a floor-to-ceiling painting. The mural is faded with age and depicts a hellish scene of unclothed men falling through fire and grasping, demonic arms. Luisa looks from one contorted, pale face to another, and frowns.

She’ll have to warn Rafael about this before he brings the girls up, she thinks, and presses on.

At the end of the upper landing, Luisa stops at a window that overlooks the mountainside.

It had been a winding road that they’d driven up to get here, one that is almost completely lost from view to the overhanging branches of surrounding woodland. If her father had meant for them to be completely alone, this break, he had surely succeeded. Luisa can’t imagine what good this will do them, with no distraction, no buffer to keep her father and Rafael from arguing the way that they always do, like wolves at each-others necks.

Outside, the wind moves the tree branches in a soothing rhythm. Inspired, Luisa cracks the window open to the child-safety catch, just wide enough to let cool air blow inside. The wind moans as it clears the new entrance, like a woman’s voice in mourning. Behind her, the click of an opening door draws Luisa’s attention.

She steps up to the threshold of the room that the draft had revealed, pushes the door further open.

Inside, with the curtains partially drawn, Luisa can make out a bedroom. The bed is a modest, wood-carved four-poster with side tables to match. Luisa steps inside without hesitation, this time. The sense of familiarity from downstairs returns, tenfold, as she takes in the room from its centre.

She turns, once, in air that’s thick with dust, until her attention is drawn by a glinting object suspended against the mirror of a vanity table.

Luisa nears it, distractedly, taking a seat at the vanity to better see.

Against the wood there, hooked on the intricate carving, hangs a necklace with a golden cornicello charm dangling from the end. Luisa touches a finger to it, making it spin, and smirks. She’s well familiar with the charms from visiting their large extended family in Italy previously, and her father’s own superstitions. When she had been younger, Luisa would wear a corno charm on an ankle bracelet to protect her from evil.

Mainly, when she had an exam coming up and had neglected her studying, which was always.

She’d misplaced the bracelet in a move, somewhere, or perhaps on a night out. Luisa briefly wonders if her father had put this in here for her, knowing how distraught she’d been when she’d lost her own, but can’t be sure. She makes a mental note to query it with him, and is about to stand again when, from the vanity’s mirror, she catches sight of a shadow against the doorframe.

Luisa’s breath stops; in seconds, she turns her attention to the figure in the mirror’s reflection, half expecting it will disappear like a figment of her imagination now that she’s seeing it straight-on. Instead, the figure solidifies into a humanoid shape, partially in shadow. Painfully still, Luisa holds the figure in sight and is working up the courage to turn around, when the door presses further open.

Luisa audibly exhales.

“ _Rose_ ,” she says, like an admonishment, as her body naturally relaxes.

From the doorway, smiling apologetically, Rose lets herself in and closes the door behind her. “I’m sorry,” she says, leaning against the door, hands behind her back against the cool wood. She looks at Luisa like she wants to go to her, like she wants Luisa to come to her. “You looked lost in thought, I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“You almost gave me a heart attack.” Luisa does turn, this time, and stands from the vanity table’s decorative chair. “When did you get here?”

“A few moments ago.”

Luisa nears her with a nod. “Was the drive okay?”

“Fine,” Rose agrees. “Everyone’s still downstairs, unpacking the cars.”

“Right.”

There is a brief quiet as they take each other in, and then Luisa surges forward. She kisses Rose like she hasn’t seen her in weeks; in reality, it’s been several trying hours. Instead of drawing back like she should have every reason to, Rose captures Luisa’s face in her hands and keeps her close, stops her from being able to draw away too soon, before Rose is done with her.

They only have time for brief kisses, for a stolen moment, and it’s not nearly enough.

Rose is the first to draw back, pressing a thumb to Luisa’s mouth to wipe away the traces of her own lipstick.

“This is going to be painful,” Luisa whispers, and Rose nods her own agreement.

“Yes, it will.”

 

* * *

 

 

The manor house feels less intimidating by dinner time, when there’s food on the table and the back door is open wide with the sounds and smells from the garden.

Emilio, at the table’s head, toasts their first meal together.

The twins clink their plastic cups together with enthusiasm, then again with everybody else seated at the table. Naturally, they tuck into their dinners with neither trouble nor complaint. From between the pair of them, Rafael carries a conversation with his sister to dispel his own discomfort. It’s a tactic they each use often, during meals with their father, and so Luisa doesn’t complain when she’s given the brunt of his attention.

“Then there was Luxembourg when I was nineteen,” Rafael is saying as he cuts into his meat. “Do you remember that one?”

Luisa smirks at the memory. “Yeah, I remember you making a fool out of yourself.”

“ _I_ made a fool out of myself?” Rafael asks, but he’s grinning.

“Yeah, you did.” Luisa turns to her father for support. “You remember this, right?”

Emilio makes a noise of reluctant agreement while chewing.

“What?” Rafael asks, smile waning. “We’re talking about the same vacation? When we stayed in that hotel with the spa, and in the next town there was that barmaid with the—” He makes a gesture with his hands, cupping them in front of his own chest, then remembers his daughters are at the table and clears his throat, returning to his food. “That barmaid.”

“Yes,” Luisa sighs, rolling her eyes. “Her name was Astra.”

Rafael’s grin returns with vengeance. “Astra, that’s it.”

Beside her, Luisa sees Rose turning toward her from her peripheral. “You’ve lost me,” she says, broadening the conversation, and Luisa turns from her to Rafael with a wicked smile. Rose, seeing it, wets her lips and makes a small humming noise. “Oh, okay, I believe I know where this is going.”

“Where this is going, is that my sister thinks she’s god’s gift to women—”

Luisa cuts in with a scoff. “When _you’re_ sitting right there?” She shakes her head, making a face at the twins until they both laugh. “Delusional. I must be, obviously.”

“She liked me,” Rafael shrugs, laughing.

“You were an arrogant nineteen-year-old boy,” Luisa counters. “Nobody liked you.” Rafael makes an offended noise, and he just well might be, so Luisa softens her tone. “She really wasn’t interested in you.”

“Oh, but she was in you?” Rafael returns to his meal, as though he’s just ended the conversation, but Luisa is watching him with a smile. Oh, if only her brother knew even half of her sexual conquests… then again, better that he doesn’t. “Anyway, if she wasn’t interested, she wouldn’t have snuck me beers all night. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Isn’t the legal drinking age eighteen?” Rose asks.

“Sixteen,” Luisa says, then turns back to Rafael. “She didn’t _sneak_ you anything, I was paying for your drinks.”

“It was the _way_ that she gave them to me,” he presses, and Luisa rolls her eyes.

“Really? Because she gave me _quite_ a bit more, before we left.”

Rafael’s head snaps up, but Luisa has returned to innocently cutting up her vegetables.

“I don’t believe you,” he says, only for Luisa to laugh.

Beneath the table, she feels a foot press against hers, soft and cool. She turns to Rose, but Rose’s attention is seemingly elsewhere while her foot curls around Luisa’s ankle, tickling up to the back of her knee and then all the way back down again. Luisa purposefully returns her focus to her plate.

“You never would, if you knew half the women I’ve been with,” she mutters.

Rose’s utensils screech against her plate.

 

* * *

 

 

Later, when it’s dark outside and significantly colder, Luisa lights the fire pit in the manor’s backyard and sips on the sweet-smelling tea that Rose has made her.

“I wish I smoked,” she says, when it’s just her and Rose and the quiet night air listening in around them. “Or still drank. It feels like I should have something to do – a reason to be out here – when it’s such a nice night like this.” She turns to see Rose on the deck chair beside her, legs tucked up to her chest.

“Why not just because it’s a nice night?” Rose asks, looking from Luisa to the fire. It dances around her blue eyes like she’s been storing it in there all along, burning up with the flames.

Luisa makes a noise of quiet agreement, or just content. They’re too close to the manor for her to say what she wants to say, too visible from the upper level windows for her to do what she wants to do. Rose is a familiar temptation, by now; Luisa can live with the longing, the way that she has for the past few years, the way that she’ll continue to do so, for as long as Rose makes her.

They’re still sitting in silence when Rafael joins them, pulling a chair up to Luisa’s side.

“The girls go down alright?” Rose asks, stirring for the first time in several minutes. She stretches her legs out in front of her, toward the fire’s glow, and her joints audibly crack.

“Yeah, where’s dad?”

“He went to bed early,” Luisa tells him. “The flight really knocked him out.”

Rafael snorts and holds his hands towards the fire, palm-side forward. “He’s getting old.”

“And soft,” Luisa adds. “He loves being a _nonno_.”

“Yeah, well one generation of our family deserves not to be terrified by him.”

Luisa casts her brother a look, but doesn’t comment. When he turns to meet her gaze, she offers him a smile. “How’s Petra?” she asks, changing the subject, because it’s what Rafael needs, sometimes, before he’s allowed to spiral into his own thoughts. It’s a characteristic that they both have in common, and so they know how to recognise it within each-other. Sometimes, that’s not always for the better.

“I don’t know, no signal,” Rafael reminds her. “I promised the girls we’d go into town to facetime her.”

“We’ll do something nice for them tomorrow,” Rose promises, and the fire crackles and pops around a new log. “To make sure they’re not missing their mother too much. And, we should probably pick up groceries, if we’re staying here the week.” She looks briefly put out by the idea, and Luisa can’t help but smirk.

“Missing your chef?” Rafael asks, his smirk mirroring’s Luisa’s, and Rose rolls her eyes.

“Missing many things,” she comments, “but it’s nice to be out here.”

Rafael nods in agreement. “It’s quiet, isn’t it? Secluded. Like nobody can bother us.”

Rose looks to Luisa and wishes that that were really the case.

After a pause, she stands and stretches and puts her shoes back on. The fire casts shadows across her face when she tells the others that she’s going to bed. “Don’t be up too late,” she says, squeezing Luisa’s shoulder as she passes, and Luisa watches her go until she disappears up the stone steps.

“Don’t tell him I said this, but I’m glad dad brought us out here,” Rafael says, looking out at the trees. “It’s such a cliché, but it feels so good to have gotten away from everything, even if it’ll all just be there waiting for us when we get back.”

Luisa hums, distracted, and the fire feels all the cooler against her skin.

 


	2. Children

Luisa wakes from a strange dream, and feels as though she’s walked into an even stranger reality, come breakfast.

The manor house loses its foreboding disposition in the morning light, more so when Luisa finds her family scattered around the large dining room table with eggs, bread, and orange juice. Luisa spies coffee, freshly brewed and steaming, on the kitchen counter top and pours herself a mug while saying her good mornings.

In the new light, the manor reveals itself to her; the stone architecture, while outdated, is a charming feature that softens the bleak walls and the fireplaces, giving the manor character. The high ceilings and the large windows make the rooms feel bigger than they are, brighter than they should be, with the forest greens in immediate view through the glass.

Her hesitation – her trepidation, even – from the day before feels like a lifetime away as Luisa takes a seat at the table and picks at a slice of toast. Through her first bite, she notices that her father, at the head of the table in his seat from the night before, looks weary. She hadn’t had the best night’s sleep, herself, and sympathises.

“What are we doing today?” she asks, as Rose takes a seat beside her.

“We’re going to see mommy,” Anna says.

“On daddy’s phone,” Ellie clarifies for the table.

Rose swallows a mouthful of coffee with a reminder that they need groceries, and Emilio shakes his fatigue to mention a business call that is imperative that he make. Luisa frowns at the mention of work, and asks him, “I thought the reason for us being so far out of the way up here was to get _away_ from work for a week?” Emilio sighs and rubs his eyes. “It’s one week, dad.”

“It won’t take all day,” he promises, and that has to be enough, because Luisa knows there’s no shaking him.

“Great.” Luisa sighs and sits back in her seat with her coffee mug. She looks between her father and brother with a frown. “You’re both going to be on your phones all day,” she tells them, and neither have the gall, at least, to deny that she’s correct. It’s not the holiday that she’d wanted – it’s not the holiday they’d promised her – but this is her family, and she isn’t at all surprised by them anymore.

Beside her, looking for all the world like she’s focused solely on a slice of toast, Rose says, “I could use a hand with the groceries.”

She offers it out there like a life preserver, and Luisa grasps on with both hands.

“I can help,” she agrees, and does not miss the near-imperceptible smile that turns at one corner of Rose’s mouth.

 

* * *

 

 

Emilio drops the two of them off in the nearest village, although ‘village’ is perhaps exaggerating the one long, winding road, and the buildings on either side of it.

Luisa and Rose stand a moment while they watch Emilio’s rented car disappear, aiming for a town with a stable wifi connection. It’s early enough that the village is awake, but not bustling, although Luisa spots a crowd a ways down the road where the village markets are open. Rose notices, too, and points them in that direction as they begin to walk.

“Did you sleep well?” Rose asks, breaking their silence, and Luisa turns to her in surprise.

It’s difficult to read Rose’s expression when she’s wearing sunglasses, and so Luisa stops trying. “Not perfectly.” A lone black cat stretches out on a doorstep that they pass, unbothered by their proximity. “I had a weird dream, I think. I forgot it as soon as I woke up, though.” She stops and squints and pulls her own sunglasses on, having kept them previously tucked into the collar of her t-shirt. “What food are you looking for?”

“I have a list,” Rose says, producing it, but she’s drawn to the fresh vegetables and fruits without even checking it. “It all looks so good.”

Luisa weighs a cantaloupe between both hands, smelling it. “Let’s get a bit of everything,” she says, and falls into Italian as she barters for a price. On the stall beside her, Rose does the same, accented but near-perfect in her pronunciation. Luisa watches her until she’s finished. “I didn’t know you were fluent,” she says, and Rose’s smile turns coy.

“I still have my secrets, even from you.”

Luisa doesn’t doubt her.

Between them, they fill two baskets of fresh food, and exchange them for reusable bags. It’s mid-day before they’re done, arms aching from the weight of their shopping, and far too warm to be out in direct sunlight. Luisa points the way toward a tiny café where they snag a table outdoors, in the shade of the building. There’s no breeze and little reprieve from the heat, but for the cold drinks they order with lunch.

Luisa looks across the table at Rose, halfway through her salad, and if they were here for any other reason, it would be something close to domestic bliss. That’s a reality that Luisa doubts she will be allowed to experience, properly. As tempting as it is to muse on it, Luisa exercises restraint in her fantasies when it comes to Rose. Linger too long on the wrong kind of thought, and she will crack beneath the weight of this precarious _thing_ they have between them.

To call it a relationship would be to give name to something that doesn’t exist – can’t exist.

Luisa is just masochistic enough to linger against the parameter of that kind of torture, but she won’t allow herself to delve any further in.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

Luisa looks up at the question, her gaze falling to Rose’s smile, amused and cautious.

“You’ve been glaring at your plate,” Rose adds, eyebrows rising. “Is everything alright?”

And, just as Luisa wants to tell her _no_ , Rose’s foot brushes against her own beneath the table, far too deliberate to be accidental. The look on Rose’s face is soft and caring, and it’s so easy to rationalise away her own reservations about their affair. It really wouldn’t be the first time that she’s done it.

“Yeah, it’s fine,” she says, then, sighs the words out and wishes for a wind. It’s cooler further up the mountain, in the old stone manor where they’re staying, and she finds with some surprise that she wouldn’t mind returning early. “Actually, it’s way too hot, and I’m still mad that Raf and dad disappeared already. It’s our _first day_ here and they’re already working.”

“Rafael went to call Petra,” Rose says, and Luisa lifts an eyebrow.

“My brother’s the worst back-seat-driver I’ve ever known. As soon as the girls have caught up with Petra, he’ll want to know everything that’s happened while he’s been gone.” She stabs at the food on her plate, trying not to pout. “This is exactly the kind of thing they said _wouldn’t_ happen, to get me to come here.”

Rose rests her chin in a hand, her hair falling partially in front of her face.

“Did you need much convincing?”

It’s asked lightly, but Luisa knows when to read into Rose’s words. She’s had far too much practice.

“You didn’t?”

“I thought it was a good idea,” Rose shrugs, and Luisa makes a noise of not-quite-amusement. “What?”

“I don’t know,” Luisa mutters, but she does. “I mean, aren’t you struggling at all with this?” At Rose’s incomprehension, Luisa leans slightly closer into the table, as though anyone would be listening in to their conversation nearby. “I have to watch you flaunt your relationship with my father every second you’re in the same room together. It’s horrible, Rose, you know it is. Doesn’t it bother you at all?”

“Of course, it does. You know it does,” Rose says, but it sounds too much like they’re on the brink of an argument, and Luisa doesn’t think she has the strength for that, in this heat. “But we knew this is what it would be like, getting into this, and you still wanted to do it. Are you changing your mind?”

It’s not an obvious ultimatum, but it still makes Luisa bite her tongue to keep from saying something that she knows she will regret, later. She lets her words sit, stew, soften, and then breathes them all out with a sigh. Releases them, unsaid. She looks at Rose and shakes her head, and God, but if she had the _strength_ …

“If I could say no to you, I’d have ended it years ago,” she says, instead, and it’s perhaps too honest, but Rose has always appreciated that from her. The words turn their small table quiet, and Luisa purposefully taps her fork against her plate to disrupt it. “But, I don’t want to talk about this. I don’t want to argue with you.”

Rose is still quiet across from her, but just as Luisa begins to worry, she reaches across the space between them and takes Luisa’s hand in her own. It’s a simple comfort, barely noticeable at all, and nothing but innocent. Luisa smiles at her when Rose meets her gaze, and Rose smiles back, small and sorry.

“I’m going to call Rafael,” Luisa says. “See if he can take us back with our groceries. Is there anywhere you need to go, first?”

Rose shakes her head and Luisa leaves the table and her unfinished lunch.

She steps into the sunlight to make the call, and it feels like fire against the back of her neck.

When she returns to the table, her temper has visibly risen.

“What’s wrong?” Rose asks, seeing her, and Luisa drops her phone too loudly against the table top.

“Rafael said he’ll pick us up in twenty minutes,” she says, falling into her seat. Across from her, Rose tenses in anticipation for what she will say next. “And, he wants us to babysit while he and my dad catch up on some work.”

“Babysit—what?”

“Apparently, it can’t wait.” Luisa picks her fork back up and stabs it into a piece of chicken. “Why they insisted on coming all the way out here, when they’re going to have to travel so far to get a decent wifi signal, is beyond me. And, it’s not just that, but this really takes the enjoyment out of this trip for the girls. First, their mom refuses to come, then their dad and grandad bail to do work they travelled all the way _out here_ to avoid. It’s totally inappropriate.”

Rose takes a deliberate sip from her drink, but the ice from it has already melted and diluted the taste.

“It’s only for the afternoon, right?”

“Yes,” Luisa agrees. “Unless it runs on. At this point, that wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Okay,” Rose nods, but Luisa easily recognises the expression on her face as a mask she slips on when she doesn’t want people to know she’s actually very displeased. “Then, we’ll babysit. They’ll have the cars, so we’ll have to stay at the manor. We can go for a walk, maybe, or just explore the house some more.”

“I think a walk would be best,” Luisa says, remembering the old mural she’d happened upon on the upper landing. It certainly isn’t the only one within the manor, albeit the most gruesome. “Not too far, though. We’re in perfect horror-movie territory and I don’t want to jinx it with my nieces there.”

Rose laughs at the idea, but doesn’t disagree.

 

* * *

 

 

The twins lead the way along a footpath through the trees.

The further that they travel, the easier the terrain becomes, as the lush forest thins to a stone-speckled plain and a narrow river that Luisa imagines would be much larger, in the wetter seasons. As predicted, it’s cooler this high up the mountains, without being cold. The girls are freshly sun-screened beneath their matching hats, and laughing ahead of where Luisa dawdles at a leisurely pace by Rose’s side.

They can’t be more than forty minutes away from the manor, Luisa thinks, and marvels at how drastically different the atmosphere feels away from the foreboding stone building. Beside her, she knocks Rose’s hand against her own by accident, and Rose turns to her with a bright smile.

“This is kind of nice,” Rose tells her, as though she’d been reluctant to admit it. She looks ahead at the girls as they bend and pick at wildflowers and stones. “They’re almost perfect, aren’t they?”

“I think Petra brainwashes them while they sleep.” Rose nudges her arm none-too-gently, making Luisa laugh. “What? I love them, I’m allowed to say it. Anyway, they’ve officially ruined children for me.”

Rose turns to her, surprised. “You want children?”

“What? No, figuratively speaking, I mean,” Luisa tries to explain, waving a hand, but Rose only smiles at the idea. “Don’t – I’m too old for that.” She ignores Rose’s scoff, even if she knows better herself. “Can you imagine what monsters I would make? I would ruin them before they were even half their age,” she says, nodding toward the twins.

“You’re good with the girls.”

“I don’t have custody of the girls.” She turns to Rose with a victorious smirk, but it dies on her lips. “Besides, they missed out on my side of the family’s genes.”

It’s said with muted self-deprecation, as though Luisa has mused over these thoughts for far too long and has desensitized herself to them – and, she has, in a way. She watches the girls and feels Rose’s gaze on her, the way that it usually is, like a phantom touch— like the residual heat from a nearby fire. A hand knocks against her own, less accidental, this time, and Luisa relaxes.

“I wouldn’t count them so lucky,” Rose muses, lowering her voice. “You’ve met Magda.”

Luisa tries and fails to hold in her laughter.

When she’s quiet, again, she releases a long breath and stops. The air is sweet and warm, and the sun feels unrelenting against her skin. Rose stops with her, wiping her brow against the back of her hand. “How far out do you reckon we are?” Luisa asks, looking back the way they’d came and then checking her watch.

“Far enough,” Rose says, and she peers around to find their girls, kneeling in the yellow grass. “Are you ready to go?”

Luisa nods her head, pulling her water bottle out of her purse, and Rose approaches the twins.

The girls look up at her from beneath the ruffled rims of their sun hats as she approaches, smiles wide and their hands stained red and purple. They laugh between them as Rose slides her sunglasses down her nose, taking in the sight with muted horror. “We’re making pies, Auntie Rose,” Ellie says, laughing again as Anna squishes more berries between her fingers.

“You’re making something,” Rose agrees, and then the smile falls from her face. She lowers herself to a crouch in front of the girls and asks, “May I see those?”

Anna holds out her hands, the berries squashed to a purple-pink pulp across every finger. Her fingernails are black where the juice has dried, like clotted blood and dirt. Ellie, having yet made less of a mess, presents a palmful of little dark berries for Rose to see. They shine beneath the sun like obsidian marbles.

“You haven’t eaten any of these, have you?” Rose asks, to more giggling in response. “Let me see your tongues.”

Twin pink tongues poke out at her, and Rose imperceptibly relaxes.

“Good, these aren’t for little girls. Let’s get you cleaned up, now.”

“Everything alright?” Luisa asks, approaching. She takes in the pulpy mess of the girls’ hands and mutters something beneath her breath. “Oh,” she grins, pushing her hair out of her eyes while Rose fishes out wet wipes from her purse, tackling the bloody mess. “Your daddy so deserves this, doesn’t he?”

“Luisa,” Rose says, sparing her a pointed glance which Luisa expertly ignores. “We’re going to walk back, now. Will you be okay?”

“Ah-huh,” Ellie nods.

Anna slips a still-damp but clean hand into Rose’s. “Maybe, if you carry me.”

 

Later, when the twins are rehydrated and left to their own devices in the manor’s immediate back garden, Luisa sets a glass of lemonade down in front of Rose and takes the deckchair beside hers. The fire pit is grey ash and still faintly smelling in front of them from the night before, with a fresh pile of firewood stacked up nearby, courtesy of Rafael’s forward thinking.

“You’re good with them,” Luisa muses as they watch the girls use twigs as wands. “You’ve never considered your own?”

Rose turns to her in quiet alarm.

“I just mean,” Luisa continues, turning to look away from Rose, because she isn’t really sure what she _just means_. She will put this brief lapse of judgement down to heat stroke, if later questioned, but right now she’s exhausted to a state of perfect peacefulness. “You’ll never get that, will you, with my dad?”

“Luisa…”

“He has two grown children, he’s got no interest in having more, but you’re still—you’re younger than I am. Doesn’t it feel like a missed opportunity?”

Rose scoffs at the idea. “What, because I’m a woman in her thirties, my life must be unfulfilled without children?”

“Of course not.”

“Don’t,” Rose stops her, and her face turns hard the way that it has to, sometimes, to keep her expression from cracking. She turns back to face the twins, watching them conjure invisible spells in the air, their twig-wands ribboning and twirling. “I’m about as interested in having children as you are,” she says, and Luisa feels her body stiffen uncertainly. It feels a little too much like a finger being prodded against her chest, proving a point.

When Rose next turns to her, it’s with a brief smile that does a poor job of dispelling the tension.

“My mother was a witch. I’m afraid I’d be just the same as she was with me, if I ever had them.”

It’s said with a smirk and a roll of her eyes, but her amusement is dismissive and unconvincing.

“I understand,” Luisa says, and she really thinks she does.

 


	3. Drug (Ab)use

Luisa wakes early in a sweat.

Light struggles through the pulled-to curtains, dim and weak with the dawn. Luisa blinks against it as she clears her mind from dreams of flames and ash. She rolls over into a discarded blanket, one that she had been wrapped up in during the previous night in the garden; it stinks of smoke from the firepit, still, and she recoils from it with a tired sigh.

In that place between wakefulness and slumber, she can still taste the wood-ash of the fire from her dreams, thick and herby, meant to choke her out. She gags against the sensation, and that more than anything finally rouses her properly from sleep. She opens her eyes wide to the ceiling, forcing her own tiredness back. She feels as though she could slip easily back into sleep, but it would be the same dream that awaited her, and Luisa dreads it.

Instead, she forces herself to sit, then to swing her legs over the bed and to stand.

She washes quickly in the newly built en suite bathroom, made to look like it matches with the old stone and narrow window, and dresses for the day because she might as well. When she treads downstairs, the stone is startlingly cold against her bare feet, but this way she poses less risk of waking the rest of the household.

The manor is dim and cold as she walks through its belly toward the kitchen, where the wide windows and the lingering smell of yesterday’s dinner clear whatever unsettling atmosphere her dreams had left behind. When Luisa tries the back door, it opens without having been unlocked, and she makes a mental note to remind Rafael – the most likely culprit, in her mind – that they may be isolated up here in the mountains, but they’re not necessarily alone.

The thought both stuns and chills her, and so Luisa quickly discards it.

She puts coffee on to boil and picks at some fresh fruit while she waits to fill her mug.

Finally, she comes to stand by the window with her coffee held beneath her chin, steam billowing up into her face. Through the haze of it, Luisa thinks she spots a figure out in the treeline that swarms the edges of the manor’s back garden, and she is so sure that she has spooked herself into seeing something that she allows herself to look.

The figure persists.

For one breath-stopping moment, Luisa looks out into the pale face of what could be a young girl, and then she recognises her.

Even while the breath leaves her in a slow exhale, Luisa’s heart pounds as she exits the kitchen onto the little stone platform by the backdoor. She watches as Rose treads up the garden, her hair drawn back from her face in a bun, and a basket hanging from one arm. She smiles when she sees Luisa, but it fades when Luisa doesn’t return it.

“Good morning,” Rose tells her, slightly out of breath from her walk. She stands at the bottom of the steps and looks curiously up at Luisa, who still hasn’t moved. “What’s wrong?”

“You’re up early,” Luisa says, and peers down at the basket – it’s filled with blackberries, blueberries, and more.

Rose looks behind her, squinting at the sky. “Yeah, I thought I’d make the most of it. Did you see the sunrise?” She turns back to Luisa and Luisa shakes her head. “Well, it was beautiful.” Rose shifts the basket to her other arm and climbs the steps to meet Luisa at the top. “Is anyone else awake?”

When Luisa shakes her head, again, Rose slips deftly closer, taking the coffee mug from her. She takes two large sips and does not wince when it burns down her throat.

“Really, what’s wrong?” she asks, again, pushing the mug back into Luisa’s hand. “You look startled.”

Luisa turns to follow her inside as she sets the basket of berries down on the dining table, but she can’t explain the feeling that had struck her when she saw Rose out at the treeline, nor does she wish to dwell on it. “I just had a weird dream,” she says, leaning against a kitchen counter with her coffee mug in both hands.

“Another?” Rose asks, distracted, as she finds a container for the berries.

“The same one, I think.” Luisa takes a sip from her coffee, frowning. “Berry picking?”

Rose agrees with a short hum as she places the berries away in the fridge.

“The girls inspired me.”

She moves around the kitchen to where Luisa is leaning, and places her hands on the countertop at either side of her. Trapped between them, Luisa regards her coolly as she sips from her coffee mug. Her display of apparent unaffectedness draws a small smile to Rose’s lips; encouraged, she presses closer, and finally eases the mug out of Luisa’s hands so that she can place it down behind her. Luisa loses all pretence, then. Her hands slide around Rose’s waist, her gaze falling to the billowy blouse and Rose’s freckled cleavage.

“It’s still early,” Luisa muses, and it’s too risky, she knows that it is, but she hasn’t heard a peep from upstairs since she got out of bed. Her fingers move to the waist of Rose’s skirt, drawing the shirt out from beneath it. She reveals a fresh slip of bare skin across Rose’s navel, and instantly traces her palms along it.

Rose sighs at the show of affection, and her expression softens the way that it always does when Luisa touches her.

“I want to show you something,” she says, easing away, and Luisa reluctantly lets her go.

She follows Rose through several doors until they reach one so far removed from the central manor that Luisa hasn’t yet had chance to discover it. It sits in the older part of the building, where the restorations were only structural. Rose leads her to a narrow stone corridor and the air turns cool and damp. At the very end of it, a door with an old iron lock sits into the wall.

“What is it?” Luisa asks, while Rose takes the key hanging nearby and unlocks it. The door opens with clear reluctance, revealing a staircase. “A basement?”

“Cellar,” Rose corrects, and begins her descent.

She makes it halfway down before she realises that Luisa has not followed her, and stops.

“What?” she asks, smiling. Lit from above, her face looks angular and gaunt. “Are you afraid?”

Luisa rolls her eyes, goaded, and follows her down.

Her bare feet sting against the cold cellar steps, and she loses Rose in the dark. With one feeling hand she finds Rose’s blouse and closes her fist around it, letting Rose blindly lead her to the end of a damask corridor. Finally, a click, and dim light fills the space in the form of a solitary buzzing lightbulb. Luisa takes in her surroundings with a frown.

“A wine cellar,” she says, and her voice bounces off the enclosed stone. “Of _course_ , there is one.”

Rose grins and turns around.

“A secret place,” she says, and she sounds younger, carefree, enchanting. She pushes Luisa back against a cold wall and kisses her, makes her hot again. She draws back and her eyes are bright and glazed, and Luisa loves her and that wild look on her face, almost as much as it terrifies her, sometimes. “Our secret place. Isn’t it perfect? No one will come looking for us down here.”

Luisa draws back, casts a glance around, and smirks.

“It’s a cellar filled with all of my temptations,” she surmises, her gaze returning to Rose. “And you’re the only one I can’t say no to.”

And, this is so like Rose, Luisa thinks. It is so like Rose to lead her exactly to the things that she craves and yet cannot indulge in— to show her the carrot and then dangle it forever just out of reach.

It’s difficult to care about that, however, when Rose’s lips drop to her throat, when she teases Luisa’s hair out of the way and exposes more of her collar. She’s always been gentle with Luisa, and here in the dimly lit cellar she is no different. Rose is soft hands and softer lips against her skin, drawing her clothes away from her, making her forget how bad of an idea this is, with her family sleeping just two floors above.

Luisa plunges her fingers in red hair and holds Rose closer, doesn’t let her stop.

She has always had an addictive personality, an obsessive personality, and Rose is the only person that it’s never scared away.

“Rose,” she says, and in one pleading look Rose understands exactly what she means.

“Yes,” she croons, pressing hands to Luisa’s cheeks, kissing her mouth. “I’ve got you,” and she lowers herself to her knees.

 

* * *

 

 

They take lunch in the garden.

The sky is overcast and breezy, and Luisa picks at a scratch against her elbow before she realises what she’s doing – or how she’d gained the mark. The cellar’s stone walls had been less than forgiving against her bare skin; they will have to find a new place, she thinks, to execute their next tryst. When she looks up across the garden table, she catches Rose’s smile, and then again she can stand a little stone-burn against her elbows, can’t she?

Distracted, she almost spills her glass when placing it back on the table, and just manages not to curse.

Rafael arches his eyebrows at her mishap, and Luisa’s expression sours. She looks away.

“You’re not still mad, are you?” he asks, across from her. He has one twin in his lap and the other fastening a bracelet around his wrist. He bounces Ellie on his knee until she laughs and almost falls off, but for his reflex-quick save. “Tell Zia Luisa not to be mad at me because I spent all day on the phone to mommy.”

Ellie screeches with laughter as he almost topples her again.

“I am mad at you, though,” Luisa tells him, rescuing a glass of orange juice that’s within precarious range of Ellie’s flailing legs. “We didn’t come out here so that you could spend all your time pretending you were still at the Marbella.” She sends her father a pointed look as he re-joins them at the table, espresso in hand. “You’re not exempt from this discussion, either.”

“I didn’t become this successful,” Emilio says, as Anna wraps a second bracelet around his wrist, “by ignoring my work for vacations.”

Luisa would argue, but she knows that he’s right.

“Then, why you insisted we come here, of all places,” she mutters, half to herself, as Anna makes her way around to her wrist. A cool plastic bracelet is clipped into place, just nicking the skin. Luisa hisses at the sudden pain, and Anna rubs her wrist better with distracted apology.

“I didn’t,” Emilio says, turning the bracelet around on his wrist. “Rose insisted we come here.”

Luisa looks up in surprise.

Across the table, Rose and Emilio share a smile, and Luisa feels it like hot water scalding in the pit of her stomach. Turning away, she scoops Anna up and sits her on her knee, letting her add a second bracelet to her wrist, this one warm from being held in her palm for so long. It’s a cheap tactic, but with the four-year-old in her lap, Luisa can’t allow herself to get angry.

“Why did you want us to come here?” she asks, and hopes her voice sounds unaffected.

Rose’s lingering gaze, when she glances up again, suggests she hadn’t been entirely successful in that particular endeavour.

“Well, Emilio mentioned once that he still owned this property, after it had been in your family for generations.”

“Centuries,” Emilio corrects.

When Rose meets her gaze over the table, Luisa’s heart quickens without her really understanding why.

“I suppose, I figured it was time that you came home,” Rose smiles, and in her eyes a glint. “So to speak.”

 

* * *

 

 

The strangeness at learning that Rose had intended for them to come here sits with Luisa for the rest of the day.

She wonders over Rose’s meaning to bring them here, if there had been meaning behind it at all, as she strolls the village at the bottom of the mountain. It’s never quite been bustling since they arrived, and truthfully Luisa doubts that it ever is, but there are shops open and children playing in the street. It’s just enough to distract her, and that’s really what she needs, right now.

Having wandered aimlessly, Luisa stops at a shallow river where a boy is playing with a dog in the water, and sits on rock that has been purposefully shaped into a bench.

It’s nearing sunset and the heat of the day is slowly beginning to dissipate.

She’ll rest here a moment, Luisa thinks, just long enough to clear her thoughts, and then she’ll begin the arduous walk back up to the manor.

Along the dusty riverbank, an elderly woman comes calling to the boy and the dog. She stops when she sees Luisa, and her face is aged and kindly as she nears. The woman has a deceptively strong quality about her, like she’s not as frail beneath her shawl as the wrinkles and grey hair would suggest. She reminds Luisa instantly of her grandmother.

The woman greets Luisa in heavy Italian, and Luisa repeats the greeting to her.

“You are visiting?” she asks Luisa.   

“I am – from Miami, but my family used to live in this village, years and years ago.”

The woman’s face crinkles into a smile.

“You returned with family,” she says, studying Luisa’s face. “You are not having a good time.”

Luisa barks a laugh before she can stop herself.

“Not to worry,” the woman titters. “Family is like that.”

“Yes – mine, more than most.”

“And, where are you staying?”

Luisa tells her, pointing up toward the mountain and the narrow road that she can just about make out from here, hidden in amongst the trees. When she turns back to the woman, it’s to find the smile has slipped from her wrinkled lips. She takes a visible step away from Luisa and crosses herself. The looks she casts Luisa, from her toes to the crown of her head, is nothing short of disparaging, and then she leaves.

Shocked to silence, Luisa stares after her.

She looks around as though it had been a trick, as though there’d be a group of children hiding behind her, just close enough to watch her freak out. Instead, only an empty village road and a wind that teases through her hair like cool, thin fingers. When Luisa looks back to the river, the woman, and the dog, and the boy, have already disappeared.

Luisa stands, after that, and makes an unhurried return to the manor.

 

Rose is alone in the kitchen, when she returns, as though she’d been waiting up just for her.

“You were gone for a while,” she says as Luisa enters and pours herself a glass of water from the tap. “I worried you’d gotten lost.”

“Why did you want to come here?” Luisa asks, holding her glass in both hands, like she’d only poured it to give herself something to do – some kind of distraction from the way that Rose watches her, now. “You could’ve convinced my dad to go anywhere at all. What made you want to come here, of all places?”

Rose watches her quietly, deliberating over how to answer, and Luisa sighs and takes a too-large sip from her glass.

“I thought it would be nice,” Rose says, and Luisa shakes her head, because she knows that’s not it. She doesn’t know how she knows, because Rose has lied to her before, lied right to her face, Luisa is sure of it, and she’d never be able to tell unless Rose wanted her to know. But, of this, she is certain. “What?”

“You’re lying,” Luisa tells her. “I don’t know why, but you are.”

For a second, with the way that Rose tongues at the inside of her own cheek, Luisa thinks she might just admit to it.

Instead, Rose picks up two mugs of steaming tea from the countertop, and presses one into Luisa’s hand.

“Drink your tea,” she tells her. “It’ll help you sleep.”

Luisa watches her sink into the shadows as she leaves.

 

* * *

 

 

Upstairs, Rose slips into her and Emilio’s bedroom with a smile.

She watches her husband from the door a moment, the way he readjusts his reading glasses as he picks through a newspaper. Emilio squints at the headlines, unfocused, occasionally muttering to himself. He turns a page and pinches the bridge of his nose, trying to see the words past the drilling in his head. Finally, he pulls the glasses off with a frustrated sigh and rubs his eyes.

“Darling,” Rose says, handing him the tea. She slips the newspaper from his lap and takes its place, instead. “Drink this, you need it.”

Emilio’s hand curls instinctively around her hip. When he sniffs the tea, however, he draws back with a distasteful noise. He looks at Rose and she nods, urging him on, smiling the same smile she’d used to bring him here. Emilio gives in to her with a sigh, taking his first sip. It’s a potent brew and it makes his eyes water, but he finishes it.

Rose watches him until the mug is drained, and smiles.


	4. First Meeting Rewrite or AU

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys ready for a little time-jumping? Tags are being updated, please remember.

[[YEARS AND YEARS AGO]]

 

There is a ring around the moon on the night that Luisa first meets Rose, and it sets the people of her village _talking_.

But, the people of her village are always talking, and Luisa has learned by now all the ways to appear too aloof to notice them.

That she is her mother’s daughter was what they had said, when she was born. Her mother had told her this, fondly, as she sat at her vanity table with Luisa in her lap and combed their hair before bed. She was her picture, not quite a perfect mirror image, but like the indistinct resemblance that you bare to your own reflection in the surface of a running river. She was like the imprint her mother had left behind, having slept too late in the long grass that the blades held her shape until a flower took bloom and filled it.

That she is her mother’s daughter is what they say, now, when she is twenty-and-seven years old and unmarried and miserable and rarely sober, and her mother is an anonymous corpse at the bottom of a river. Her father’s persistent attempts at marrying her to the eligible bachelors from their village, and beyond, have made Luisa grow bitter like a crooked tree, have made her the brunt of many a cruel tale that is passed around her village on tongues like little knives.

But, she is beautiful, and she is wealthy, and the village has too much respect for her father and the family that she was, by chance, born into. She is arrogant, if lonely, and she pulls her dissatisfaction in like the well-worn strings of her favourite corset. Quick, until she cannot breathe, and if she cannot breathe then she cannot, at least, lend voice to the misery that’s inside of her, hard as bone and just as integral to keeping her upright.

It is so familiar to her, now, her own unhappiness, that it is as much a crutch as it is a burden.

Luisa uses it to scare off the men who come to her with flowers and too-strong-cologne. She lets them see it in her, the future that she would offer them, the cold eyes that tell them they will take mistresses to warm their bed or it will not warm at all.

It is a bad omen around her neck, like the ring around the moon that night, and it tells all who see her that something terrible will happen when they cross her, should they not throw salt over their left shoulder, or burn sage in the corners of their home, or wear a cornicello charm around their throats.

That Rose sees her, then, and still approaches her after the dinner that her father had invited her back to, takes Luisa’s notice.

(But, then, there are many things about Rose that take Luisa’s notice— that night and all nights thereafter.)

It is not uncommon for her father to have guests around for dinner. Less common, is that Luisa is an invited guest among them, but she does not count herself bereft of their company. She became an embarrassment to her father after her second, public rejection of a marriage proposal that, by all accounts, would have suited her quite well on paper, did she not think herself worth more.

(These are the tales that the village people tell— Luisa will not marry for greed, or for the sickness that grew inside her while she grew inside her mother.)

The beginnings of courtships had slowed and then stopped, after this incident, and that more than anything had aggrieved her father’s temper.

This is how the village sees her, as an old maid before her time, as a flower plucked before it could bloom— dissatisfaction and lost potential.

Luisa lets herself dry up like a river in mid-summer when it comes to romance. She puts it far from her mind, keeps it out of her own extensive private library, and when the dusty books and old tomes sober her too much, she drinks until she can only sleep and doze in bed with her own head-sickness. To romance, Luisa is dry bark and brown grass and tinder, and all those other dead and dying things that hiss when they burn.

That night, beneath the ringed moon, Rose sees her through an open window and joins her in the garden with curious eyes and a trembling candle.

“I thought I saw a figure,” Rose says.

Her Italian is clumsy and daintily mispronounced. Rose is a pale thing with a shock of red hair that Luisa wants to touch as soon as she sees it; she does not understand what it is to be a moth drawn to the flame until that moment. That she is a flame, Luisa recognises, as one look from Rose sets a fire burning somewhere inside of her where she has been dry and cold and untouched for too many years.

Luisa looks at Rose and thinks, _you’re as delicate as that candlelight and just as dangerous_.  

It is easy to see why her father wants to bed her, and she says as much to Rose because Luisa’s lips are wine-slick, and she is crude and untouchable in her own garden.

She expects offence, in return, not the way that Rose smiles and sits beside her on the cold stone bench.

Rose looks old enough to be her younger sister, but there is something deceptively ancient in the eyes that peruse Luisa like glinting jewels.

(This is what Rose is, Luisa understands, even from this first meeting—a jewel, a flame, a pretty thing that draws Luisa in the way that it draws everybody in. A _lure_. That her father feels entitled to reach for it, to take her, like he takes all things that he wants, is no surprise to Luisa, who feels the same.

And, this is what Rose’s smile is, when the thought crosses Luisa’s mind— _recognition_.)

 

* * *

 

  


Luisa has stolen kisses from other girls before – and they had been stolen, secret things that she had not been able to dwell too long on afterwards for furious blushing and fright, for a hysteria that made her heart wild and sore and sick inside her chest – but she is unprepared and inexperienced and _shy_ when Rose undresses her.  

That her body is so unlike Rose’s does not help.

Rose looks unrecognisable as she peels the layers away from Luisa’s skin, as she runs just the very tips of her fingers along the indentations and creases that her clothing has left against her. Embarrassed, Luisa stops looking at her face; she is almost eye-level and too-close to pale breasts and pink nipples and the loose, red hair that frames them, and she cannot stop herself when her hands rise into view and touch Rose.

Her gentle exploration is allowed. Rose encourages her with soft noises that make Luisa over-warm, that set the fire inside her blazing as though a powerful wind had just changed direction to find her, to chase the neglect right out of her with pale fingers and pink lips and scorch marks against her throat in the shape of Rose’s mouth.

Luisa’s fingers touch and tease; it is by accident that she captures sensitive nipples between her thumbs and forefingers and _pinches_ , and Rose startles in a pleasant way that deepens the pink hue of Luisa’s cheeks. She repeats her discovery, relentless, eliciting noises from Rose that make her head spin like she is dancing and too drunk.

Finally, when she is pinker than she is pale, Rose takes Luisa’s hands away from her breasts.

Luisa opens her mouth for protest, not apology, but the words are stumped when Rose takes her hand and presses it between Rose’s legs.

(Luisa has touched herself here, before— she understands, in vague ways, the sensation that she is provoking.)

“Oh,” she says, still, as her fingers slide through, _press into_ , Rose’s arousal.

Her head slides back and she looks, for the first time without embarrassment, up into Rose’s face, and she recognises the look there that she had not been able to place before as desire. In that moment, the life that Luisa has made for herself all these miserable years is as scattered as loose kindling, and Rose is an open hearth before her. Luisa knows already that if she commits to this then they will go down in smoke and fire, and she will no longer be able to rely on the safety of _never having to never want_.

Inexperienced as she may be, Luisa is a fast study.

She slides her fingers into Rose, cups her sex in her whole palm, and sets the two of them aflame.  

 

They are still naked and in bed together when Rose pools something cool and weighted into her palm.

Luisa opens her hand to reveal a chain with a golden cornicello charm on the end of it. She holds it up to the dim candlelight and smiles, craning her neck to see Rose’s face. Rose is propped up by one hand and an elbow, her hair in soft waves modestly curtaining her breasts. Her eyes shine brightly, the way that they always do even in the dark, like there’s a candle on the other side of them flickering away in the gusts of her thoughts.

“For luck,” she tells Luisa, and Luisa laughs and kisses her.

“Superstitious.”

It is never just one kiss, anymore, but as many as she can take, fill herself with, before she remembers that they are not supposed to have these tender moments.

“You would do better to ward the door,” she says against Rose’s mouth.

Rose disrupts the sheets by rolling on top of her; Luisa’s entire world is reduced to red hair and pink lips and moon-bright blue eyes.

“I could do that, too.”

“Really?”

“You doubt me, Luisa?”

Rose smirks even as she says it, and she draws herself up to her full height, still straddling Luisa’s hips. Luisa lies with her head in feather-stuffed pillows and watches Rose above her, and oh, her lover is a proud thing, she thinks, as she takes in the neck and breasts and the arched back. And, _her lover_ , she thinks again, just to think it.

“Doubt you?”

Rose rolls her hips into her, and no, Luisa could never, but Rose knows this.

She takes Luisa’s hands in hers, palm to palm, their fingers to fingers, as though she were comparing sizes. There is something deliberate in the way that she holds them there, aloft, and looks down at Luisa, and speaks in a language that Luisa does not recognise, that makes her shiver like there were a draft coming from her window.

“What was that?” Luisa asks, and Rose’s smile is small and sly, like it is, sometimes, when she is teasing Luisa – and she teases her often.

“A spell.”

But, Luisa is distracted, now. She slides her hands along Rose’s bare arms until she reaches her shoulders, her throat, her chest. She takes soft breasts in both hands, lingers there, until she continues down Rose’s ribs and stomach and the soft thighs that squeeze around her. And, _you are the spell_ , Luisa thinks, looking at her, touching her.

She takes Rose’s hands in hers again and uses them to pull Rose in, pull her down, to kiss her and kiss her and _kiss her_ —

“A love spell,” Rose whispers into her mouth. “So that you’ll always come back to me.”

“Come back?” Luisa pushes red hair away from Rose’s face and shakes her head. “I’ll never leave.”

(These days, it is too easy to make promises that she cannot keep.)

 

* * *

 

 

Luisa remembers very little of her father and Rose’s wedding night, but she does remember the days that followed thereafter, like a mind-fog of wine and misery.

It is an old reality of Luisa’s life that she comes crashing back down into when she watches her father slip a ring onto Rose’s finger. She does not have to be around them for long, is the one consolation, as their travel to Venice keeps them from their home for five days and four restless nights. Luisa spends each one in the grips of unreality; Rose is now both step-mother and lover, and the two cannot co-exist. She doesn’t know where to draw the distinction between the two, when both feel so non-existent in Rose’s absence.  

Luisa is torn between both identities, equally within and without them.

When she first sees Rose, her step-mother, she is thinner and paler than she remembers her, and it has not yet been one week.

She comes to Luisa in the night, the way that she used to, the way that her father indulges because he does not know what happens when the door closes behind Rose and she slips into Luisa’s bed beside her. Rose does not slip into her bed, this night, but sits on the edge of it like a still, stoic thing that Luisa knows she is not.

“Luisa,” Rose says, when she does not stir. “I know you’re not sleeping.”

There is little she can hide from her, even here.

Luisa slips purposefully further down the bed to a cold spot in the mattress, away from Rose, but Rose does not slip in beneath the sheets behind her, as she is supposed to. Luisa feels her absence keenly, like a lump in her throat that reminds her, _you do not beg_ , even when she wants to.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

She wants to tell Rose, _go_ , but it is not a word she uses with Rose, not one that she’s told her before. Her mouth has tasted too many sweet kisses and it will not betray them, will not tell Rose, _leave_ , _return to your husband_ , _no_. She should, this Luisa knows above all else. What she and Rose have – _had_ – is for stolen night-hours and closed doors. There had only ever been room for them in the shadows, where no one could see, where no one could tell whose hands were on whose skin, whose mouth was lathing sweet kisses across whose throat.

Now, even in the shadows, Rose will be her father’s bride, and no snuffing out of candles or locking of doors will keep that truth out of their affair.

What they had between them will die the way that fires die when left to burn, unattended— un-stoked.

Luisa tastes this simple fact like ash at the back of her tongue. Still, Rose sits at the edge of her bed and does not move, and Luisa wants her to leave and never come back, and she wants Rose to slip beneath the sheets, still, and kiss her and tell her that nothing has changed, that they can still _have this,_ and she can still be her lover and her step-mother and it will work.

“I’m sorry,” Rose says, and it will never be enough, and Luisa hates it.

“I wish I’d never known you.”

 

* * *

 

 

Mid-summer cools into autumn and the earth turns crisp and red.

Luisa’s father grows sick the way that the world grows sick, and at first she puts his ailment down to seasonal change. He is a stoic man and he persists, growing ashen and weary as the weeks take their toll on his aging body. Luisa has only ever known her father to be an indomitable figure, a presence to respect, and when she cannot respect him, to fear.

When he falters, then, panic slips down her chest like ice water.

Emilio only allows her to call for a doctor because he is barely conscious in his bed. Rose sits by his side as a doctor inspects down his throat and behind his watery eyelids, then asks him to remove his shirt. He rules out plague and pestilence and Luisa is allowed into the room, at last. She is not told his diagnosis and she does not ask, only if he will recover.

The doctor’s answer leaves her wanting.

When the doctor leaves and it is just she and Rose by her father’s bedside, Luisa comes to the quiet realisation that this is the longest that they have sat, side by side like this, in months. She cannot help but look at Rose, and it’s no surprise that she’s still inexplicably beautiful, if thin and pale and gaunt in ways that she hadn’t been when her cheeks were soft and red from laughing in Luisa’s bed.

Rose catches her looking but she does not turn to her right away.

When she does, Luisa sees that same flickering candlelight behind her eyes, and feels her stomach burn.

 

The house is quiet beneath her father’s bedrest, and some nights it is just the two of them at the dinner table, eating in heavy silence but for the scraping and tapping of their utensils.

This evening, more than the others, Luisa is opposed to even brief conversation.

Her father’s condition is not improving, and she has spent the afternoon drinking wine and crying, and then sobering up again in the near-uncomfortable cold of the garden. Across the table from her, Luisa feels Rose’s gaze on her the way that she hasn’t, for months. Rose has a way of looking at her that makes Luisa feel like it could sooner be her hands and not just her eyes, and it stokes at desire like embers.

She is too exhausted to quench them back down again, and this, she tells herself, is why she leaves her bedroom door just slightly ajar when she goes to bed.

Luisa does not keep a candle by her bedside, and the shutters are closed about her window, blocking any natural light.

She is dozing and close to real sleep when the flicker of unsteady candlelight pushes against her bedroom door. Luisa opens her eyes, her back to the source of light, and watches as shadows move against the wall that she’s facing. The candle is set down, and Rose must understand her mood, tonight, for she promptly extinguishes it between her finger and her thumb.

The bed dips when she slides in behind Luisa, and she’s warmer than Luisa remembers – she shoves back the sheets and turns around and, with no hesitation, she kisses Rose and draws her on top of her. Rose is pliant to her touch, to her manoeuvring; she lets Luisa position her how she needs her, in ways that they can both be close, with frenzied hands beneath clothes and inside silken smalls.

They crest their first climax in an out of sync rush.

Rose tries to roll off of her, but Luisa stops her with hands at her hips.

Above her, out of breath and pink and radiant, Rose releases something of a breathy laugh and kisses her. Instead of rolling away, she sits up so that she is straddling Luisa’s hips, and at least from this position she can _see_ her how she wants to be seen. While Luisa catches her breath, Rose teases her hair out of her face and unfastens the buttons at the front of Luisa’s night dress.

The soft fabric peels away around her clavicle, and Rose’s hands still as she sees the necklace that she’s wearing, and the little cornicello charm resting against her breast.

“You kept this,” she says, surprised, as she touches her fingers to it, and all of her red hair is tumbling down in front of her face. Those moon-bright eyes stare down at Luisa with quiet intensity. “We’re going to be okay, Luisa, I can swear it to you, if you like. I thought I knew what direction my life was fated to take, but I’m not prepared to lose you, do you understand?”  

Her words could shatter something, but Luisa closes her eyes to them so that she cannot see.

She draws Rose back in to her with hands at her shoulders, the back of her neck, pulling her down to soft kisses. Rose is a fire, though, and Luisa remembers this— remembers that she’ll never be able to contain her passion, to keep it from burning bright and out of her control. Rose undresses her and then herself, and then she slips a hand between Luisa’s legs, and Luisa understands the simple truth that she will never again be _dry_ with Rose around.

“We’ll be together, properly, once your father dies,” Rose says, and Luisa’s body bends against her in shock.

Her eyes open to see the wild look on Rose’s face as she pleasures her, and her climax builds with equal horror.

“One more dose and he’ll be gone forever, this will all be over— we can slip away tonight, Luisa, I’ve already packed a bag.”

Luisa gasps as Rose builds her higher, higher, cresting on the edge of euphoria and fear. Her fingers between Luisa’s legs are relentless, are everything Luisa remembers, and it has been too long since she even touched herself like this, that she reaches her climax too quickly. She clings to Rose, wet with sweat and tears, and shaking.

Rose kisses her face with a cool mouth, her cheeks and her eyelids and her forehead, and finally her lips.

She draws her fingers through Luisa’s tears and tells her, “don’t be afraid of me.”

Luisa is glad of the dark room, that her expression cannot be seen.

“I’m not.”

 

* * *

 

 

Luisa stops Rose before she can enter her father’s room.

“It should be me,” she says, as she takes the little glass vial from Rose’s hand. “You said there was a carriage waiting? Prepare it to leave immediately.”

Rose does not relinquish the vial easily. She keeps her grip on it until Luisa looks into her face, and it is stark curiosity staring back at her. Luisa does not shrink beneath her gaze.  

“You must go,” Luisa tells her, and she presses up to kiss Rose’s mouth. She has not stopped shaking since she learned of Rose’s plan. “Please, I have to say goodbye.”

It is with no small reluctance that Rose leaves her, and Luisa stands a breath or two outside of her father’s room. She feels sick like she has drank too much, like there is tar in her belly and she has to get it out. She is over-warm and cold-sweating as she enters her father’s room. A candle is still burning at his bedside when she takes a seat beside him.

Emilio stirs to dazed incomprehension. He is feverish to the touch, when Luisa lays a palm against his forehead.

“Papa,” she says, and he blinks up at her, unspeaking. Luisa looks down at the glass vial in her hands, turning it over, letting the candlelight hit the elongated curve of it until the liquid inside shimmers. “You’ve always known who I am, haven’t you? You must have. You’ve protected me from it for so long, from what would happen to me if it was ever found out. You’ve protected yourself from it, too.”

She looks to her father’s watery eyes and wonders if he’s lucid enough to really understand what she’s saying.

“But, this is my truth, papa, and I’m not afraid to say that to you anymore. I’m in love with a woman and I’m going to run away with her, and we’re going to be happy together because she loves me, too. She brings out everything good in me, and you’re not going to stop us from being together, because—”

She looks down at the glass vial in her hands, and Emilio’s drooping eyes follow her gaze.

“I thought I could do this,” Luisa whispers, and she sets the vial down on her father’s bedside table, “but I can’t. You have made me resent myself for too many years, but I can’t. I love you, still, and now I’m going to leave.”

And, while she stands to do just that, her father’s hand grasps weakly around her wrist.

Luisa stills, leans into him, as he draws in a red-faced, moaning breath.

He tells her, “ _Witch_.”

 

* * *

 

 

They do not get far when their carriage is stopped by pounding hooves and shouting voices.

Rose checks behind the curtain of the carriage window, in shock. When she turns to Luisa, her expression is accusing.

“You didn’t kill him.”

“He’s my _father_.”

 

* * *

  


The trial does not last long.

By the end of it, Luisa is cried-out and hoarse from screaming.

She does not know what has happened to Rose, and she has been too afraid to ask.

She has been pulled and plucked, and picked at and inspected, by hands so unlike any that have ever touched her before. She is sore and malnourished and too exhausted to protest when they put her to the stake, when they start the fires at the post below. The smoke billows quickly across the treated hay, meant to put her into heavy sleep before she feels a lick of flame; Luisa’s eyes stream and she chokes and she gags against it, as it poisons her lungs.

From her perch, through the black smoke, she sees the orange sun slip beneath the mountains. It burns the shape of a closed bud into her vision—she sees it still behind her eyelids.

As she begins to lose consciousness through her coughing fit, Luisa’s thoughts take her back to the first time Rose had shared her bed as her lover. She had known, even then, that she would burn for what they had. She had not imagined it would end like this. It had been worth it, she thinks, the short life that she had lived in her own truth.

_It had been worth it_ , as the flames grow tall and her skin blisters.

Luisa closes her eyes and suffocates in the smoke. 

 

* * *

 

 

[[THE PRESENT]]

 

Luisa wakes with a dry mouth.

She sits up in bed and the manor is quiet the way that it is always quiet, at this time of night, although she does not know what time that would be. She reaches for the tea that she had left on her bedside table, but the mug is empty when she brings it to her lips. Her dreams cling to her like the sheets cling to her when she stumbles out of bed.

Luisa takes the cold stone stairs to the kitchen. She pours herself a glass of water from the tap and expects she is alone— startles, when she spots a figure enter the room behind her, pale and cautious and with all of that soft, red hair tumbling down her shoulders. Luisa stares at her, uncomprehending, and the dream comes back to her with the intensity of a lighting match.

“Rose,” Luisa gasps, and collapses.


	5. Caught Red-Handed

Luisa wakes alone in her bed.

The room is cool and dim, although she can make out the traces of light shining in through a crack in the closed curtains. She feels as though she has slept for three days straight and her head dizzies when she sits up, making her vision momentarily white-out. She presses fingers to the bridge of her nose, needling the pressure there, but it is a throbbing at the back of her head that causes her to wince when she focuses on it.

“You hit your head,” Rose says from the doorway, and Luisa wonders just how long she’s been standing there, watching her. Rose enters the room with a glass of water in hand, and places it down at Luisa’s bedside before taking a seat on the bed. She looks at Luisa with obvious concern. “How are you feeling?”

“Disoriented,” Luisa answers.

“You should come downstairs and eat something, when you’re ready.”

Luisa sighs but nods her head. “What time is it?”

“Almost noon.”

“How did I get back in bed?”

She remembers waking in the middle of the night, going for water, and she remembers seeing Rose and then seeing _nothing_ in the kitchen. After that, not a blip. Vaguely, she remembers the feeling from a dream, if not the dream itself. It lingers in her mind like fog, or perfume; Luisa can’t tell if it was a good dream or a bad one, but waking from it had exhausted her.

“Rafael carried you back upstairs after you fainted.” Rose shifts on the bed. “Do you remember—?”

“Fainting? Yeah.”

“Do you remember why?”

Rose’s gaze is unnervingly focused, when Luisa meets it. She frowns because her head aches and makes a noise that tells Rose, _no_. Rose’s tense shoulders sink with a disappointed sigh. She’s wearing a loose-fitted white blouse, today, tucked into a three-quarter-length pair of blue trousers, and she smells like flowers and fresh air, like all the life outside of Luisa’s closed window. Luisa looks at her longingly, and Rose softens, like she just can’t help herself.

(That is always the case, though, with Rose and Luisa. They _just can’t help themselves_.)

“Here, drink this.”

Rose passes Luisa the glass of water, and Luisa finishes it in three large gulps. When she lowers the glass, again, she’s short of breath. She wipes the residual water from her upper lip and leans carefully back into the pillows, mindful of the lump at the back of her head. She feels a little better after her water, not dizzy or nauseous, or particularly sore aside from when pressure is being exerted to her tender spot.

“I want to do something fun today,” Luisa says. “Can you open those curtains, please?”

“You should really take it easy,” Rose tells her, standing to open the curtains, anyway. She lets in the mid-day sunlight and cracks the window open, for good measure. The bedroom fills with the sound of tree leaves rustling in a breeze, and any lingering tension from Luisa’s dreams dissipates. “You hit your head pretty hard last night.”

“I have a hard head. Besides, I’m not concussed.”

Rose folds her arms against her stomach. “Would you be able to tell, if you were?”

“Yes,” Luisa tells her, pointedly, because she may have cruised shit-faced drunk through med school, but she never cheated a single exam. To prove her point, she shoves the single bed sheet down her legs and kicks it off her feet. Swinging her legs over the side of the bed is the next step, and while Luisa isn’t at all incapable of it, she becomes suddenly distracted by the look on Rose’s face as her bare legs are revealed.

It has been too long since they’ve had time enough to remove clothes instead of simply pushing them to one side and making do, and Luisa recognises the hunger in Rose too easily. It’s like a single flame behind her eyes, fiercely blazing, looking for the next thing that it can consume. It turns her cheeks the faintest pink beneath her freckles.

Rose seems to recognise her own arousal around the same time, and she clears her throat, uncrossing her arms. She flicks perfectly coifed red hair away from her face, looking away, and she is backlit by the window and wordlessly beautiful. Before Luisa has time to muse on how badly she wishes that she could wake up to this every day, Rose moves towards her bedroom door.

“Come downstairs when you’re ready,” she tells Luisa, lingering in the doorway, one foot inside her room and the other out. She looks back to Luisa and smiles – a tender, fleeting thing. “I’ll put something together for you to eat.”

Luisa wants to ask her to stay a moment longer. Instead, she says, “thank you,” and watches as Rose leaves.  

 

At the breakfast table, Rafael pulls a chair out for her and Luisa has to bat him away to keep him from tucking her back in again.

“Alright, I’m sorry,” he says, and she knows he isn’t.

Rafael re-takes his seat beside her, and not seconds later a plate of cooked meats, cheeses, fruits, and salad is placed down in front of her. Rose stands behind her a moment, hands on her shoulders, as Luisa pops a chunk of room-temperature cheese past her lips and thanks her. For just a splinter of a second, with Rose squeezing her shoulders, and her brother sipping coffee beside her, and the twins across from her picking at a plate of sliced fruit between them, this is everything Luisa wants in life and she is content.

The moment is broken by the baritone cadence of her father’s voice.

“How did you sleep, sweetheart?”

Luisa’s smile is strained when she turns to him, and the room feels decidedly cooler when Rose’s hands slip away from her shoulders. He looks as exhausted as she feels, suddenly, but he has always hidden it well. Emilio has a folded newspaper by his plate of bread and jam, and a half-empty coffee cup in hand. He studies Luisa like she’s a chart of figures that his accountant has dropped into his lap, claiming discrepancy.

“Good,” she says, rubbing her throat. “Completely fine, really, I must have just been tired.”

Emilio’s expression relaxes some, and Luisa blames the lump in her throat on guilt. She pours herself a glass of fresh juice and drinks until her teeth are cold.

She sets the glass down too loudly against the table. “So, what are we doing today?”

Luisa looks pointedly around the table.

Perhaps it’s due to her fainting spell the night before that Rafael makes an extra effort this morning. “Well, why don’t we all go into town together?” he asks. “Get some food, have a walk, pick up some gifts for mommy and Mateo.” This, he directs at the twins, who are instantly enamoured by the idea.

“It would be nice to see somewhere new,” Rose says, pushing Emilio’s plate closer to him.

The jam on his toast is deep red, almost purple, and makes Luisa think of the mess that the twins had made of their hands the other day.

Emilio picks the toast up and agrees to the plan around a tart mouthful.

 

* * *

 

 

Luisa changes into a dress for their trip, something short and loose and just a little too low-cut, but she’s on holiday, damnit.

She rides with Rafael and they sing along to Disney songs louder than the girls do, and with far too much enthusiasm, but it’s exactly what Luisa needs after the night she’s had. Her father and Rose had set off minutes before them, but they are within easy seeing-distance in the front window, in a car identical to the one she’s in. Luisa can’t imagine what it is they must talk about, when they’re alone.

“Lu?”

Her head snaps to Rafael, and the look that he casts her tells her it isn’t the first time he’s said her name. “Yeah?”

“This is your song,” Rafael says, and Luisa tunes back in before rolling her eyes.

“Really?”

Rafael shrugs, laughing, but as the next chorus plays, Luisa turns back to see the twins and sings, “ _it means no wor—ries, for the rest of your days—_ ”

(And, if Rafael had meant for just this twenty-minute car ride into town, then maybe it was _her song_.)

 

It’s mid-afternoon by the time they arrive, and they leave the cars to explore the town.

It is in stark contrast to the village and their lonely manor house on the mountainside, but it is a welcome reprieve for Luisa, who takes the twins by a hand each and swings their arms as they stroll along a high street road. Behind them, a view of the Italian countryside bakes beneath the high sun, and it’s the first time since arriving that Luisa has felt truly and completely at ease.

(It helps, that Rose is behind her, that she cannot see her arm through her father’s or hear the quiet words that they may be sharing with one another.)

Rafael saunters ahead of them, hands in his pockets, perusing the store fronts and occasionally turning back to see them— to pull faces at the girls until all three of them, Luisa included, pull faces back. There is something about being here, about being away from the Marbella, that brings it out in them, and Luisa clings all the tighter to it as she knows that it won’t last.

While walking, a street vendor selling flowers grabs the girls’ attention.

They buzz like little bees around his stall until Rafael buys them a sunflower each, to walk with. The merchant thanks them in laughing Italian and Rafael says to Luisa, “I’m thinking of hiring them another language tutor.”

Luisa makes a face. “Another? They’re four years old.”

“It’s the best time for them to learn Italian,” he says, and, well, he has her there. “It’s not like they’ll have a chance to pick it up at home.”

In situations like this, Luisa finds it easier to tell him, “you know best,” and leave it there.

(Privately, and always privately, she remembers her own childhood and the nannies who raised her in a flavour of English, Spanish, and Italian. There had been something special about speaking to her parents in their native languages, about carrying her parents’ history with her, and their parents’, and theirs before them. It is something that she would pass on to her own children, hypothetical and unlikely as they may be.)

At dinner time, when they are exactly three shopping bags heavier, they stop at a family-ran restaurant and eat pasta and _real_ pizza, cheese and mushrooms and olives, and then ice cream for dessert. It’s too late in the day for coffee but the adults indulge, anyway, in place of a bottle of red. 

The sun sets on them, like that, and the town lights up with street lamps and a candle in the centre of their table.

Luisa sits back in her chair and looks at her family. She feels full to bursting on her love for them all.

(It’s not perfect – they are not nearly even _okay_ , half the time, but they’re hers and they’re all she has and she loves them, even when she hates them.)

 

* * *

 

 

On the ride back to the manor, the girls fall asleep in the car with their rumpled sunflowers in their laps.

They’re a sticky mess of ice cream and chocolate sauce because, while they are their mother’s little angels, they’re also four years old and on vacation. Luisa helps Rafael carry them to bed, a girl between them, and stays with them through their bedtime routine until they’re both tucked into the same double bed beside one another. She leaves Rafael to say goodnight to them and finds her father and Rose downstairs in the kitchen.

It’s still light out and the garden door is wide open.

Rose carries two cups of tea outside with her (she is always brewing tea, these days), and Emilio follows a step behind.

Luisa joins them around the unlit fire pit, and Rafael when he’s put the girls to sleep, and they sit up and talk until it’s late and the air is too cool to not have cardigans or blankets around them, even with the fire burning. It’s almost a collective decision to go to bed early, exhausted as they are from a day spent walking and eating, but Luisa sits up in her room for almost an hour after the house has grown silent.

She keeps her window open so that she can hear the wind in the trees and the sounds from all the creatures that are waking for the night.

Luisa had brought one book with her for their trip, just to have something with her for the flight, but it has been largely neglected after the first few chapters. She sits up with it, now, finding the dog-eared page where she had left off, and reads in relative silence until she hears footsteps outside her door.

She sets the book aside and checks the time on her phone— about the only thing it’s useful for, while here.

It’s almost midnight and there’s no reason for anybody to be lingering outside her door, yet here they are.

With anticipated caution, the door handle lowers until it clicks and the door opens just a slip, until whoever it is sees that she is still up and pushes it properly open. Luisa doesn’t realise that she’d been expecting her, until Rose enters her room and her body reacts instinctively to what she knows is about to happen.

She almost asks Rose what she’s doing here, but there’s no need for the pretence.

Rose nears the bed with purpose; it creaks as she crawls up it, and Luisa has just enough time to move her phone and book before Rose is in her lap, kissing her. She is dressed for bed with a robe around her, her face clean and fresh and freckled from the sun. She pushes her hands into Luisa’s hair and holds her steadfast until they’re breathless.

When she draws back, she leans her forehead against Luisa’s and looks down into her cleavage.

Luisa has changed out of her clothes, but the t-shirts that she wears to bed are loose and cotton thin, and they leave very little to the imagination.

“Do you have any idea how badly I wanted you today?” Rose whispers, biting her own lip. Her cheeks are beautifully flushed. “You wore that dress on purpose.”

“I wore that dress because it’s too hot,” Luisa whispers back, and Rose groans and tells her, _yes, it is_. “Not what I meant.”

“It wasn’t really the dress.”

“No?”

Rose shakes her head. She looks at Luisa like she wants to _consume her_ , but that’s never really far from the truth.

“It’s just— _you_. You make me insatiable.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say you’re insatiable,” Luisa tells her, sliding her hands along Rose’s bare legs until she has both her robe and her night dress bunched up around her hips. Rose arches into her touch the way that she always does, because Luisa can give and give, but Rose will only keep _taking_ until somebody stops her.

(Luisa is in no habit of stopping her.)

She presses her thumbs into the natural divots at Rose’s hips, and Rose keens into her.

“You really need this, huh?” she asks, and Rose nods her head.

Luisa does not tell her _, be quiet_ , does not have to. She could have Rose whimpering like a kitten, if she wanted, but it’s too much of a risk while they’re here. It’s too much of a risk, full stop, but Luisa does not think of that as she unties the front of Rose’s silk robe and peels it back, away from her. Rose is wearing a rose gold nightdress underneath, and Luisa wants nothing more than to make wrinkles of it, to pull it from Rose’s body and discard it on the floor without care.

“Stay right there,” she says, pulling the robe over Rose’s shoulders and down her arms. “I want to see you when I make you come.”

Rose makes a breathy noise in her lap, but she is pliant and flushed and grasping for purchase in Luisa’s t-shirt as her night dress is removed. All of her red curls fall about her shoulders, framing pink cheeks and parted lips, and the wildfire burning behind her eyes.

Luisa takes her naked body in with nothing short of hunger on her face.

Rose is a vision, and she’s all _hers_.

Luisa draws her hands over every inch of skin, and Rose is hot to the touch and trembling beneath the attention. When Luisa slides her hands down Rose’s back to cup her ass, to pull her closer, further in, Rose catches a gasp at the back of her throat and rolls into her, searching for friction.

(Luisa will never understand how she can do this without literally losing her goddamn mind— wonders if she actually might have, already.)

“Please, Luisa.”

“Sh, I know, just let me take my time. I need to take my time with you, or I’ll rush this and I’ll regret it. I hate rushing, especially when it comes to this.” She runs her eyes along Rose’s breasts and then follows the exact route with her hands and mouth, instead. Rose sinks into her touch. “I’ve got you, okay?”

“Okay,” Rose agrees, and bites her bottom lip.

She trembles and squirms as Luisa toys with her, teasing her breasts and her ass and all of those sensitive places that Luisa is oh so intimately familiar with. She brings Rose to the brink of distraction before she’s even touched her, that when she does _touch her_ , Rose’s eyes open wide and her gaze snaps to Luisa’s face. There is a sense of urgency behind her expression— and more than some pleading.

Well, Luisa decides that she’s been cruel enough.

She strokes her fingers between Rose’s legs and smiles at how wet she is.

“God, you’re unbelievable,” she says, as Rose struggles to keep quiet above her.

Hands fist in her t-shirt as Rose bucks her hips and attempts to grind into Luisa’s hand, but Luisa purposefully lessens the pressure.

“Oh, no, you know better than that.”

“Lu,” Rose whines as quietly as she can, and she brings both hands to Luisa’s cheeks. There’s a glaze to her eyes that Luisa knows to mean that she’s close to tears, and for a moment it stuns her. Rose hitches a breath and her voice shakes when she speaks. “I don’t think I can last, tonight.”

Her entire body vibrates in Luisa’s lap.

“Please?”

“Hey, yeah, okay.” Luisa wraps an arm around her. She pulls Rose in close and increases the pressure between her legs, but keeps her hand still. “Are you alright?”

Rose presses her mouth to Luisa’s temple and nods. “Yes, just— _really_ need to come.”

It comes out as a breathy laugh, just a trickle of noise that could be confused for a sob by anybody else, but it makes Luisa smile. She hums low in her throat and when she starts moving her hand between Rose’s legs, again, Rose stiffens and stops breathing.

“Then, let me take care of that, yeah?”

Rose nods her head and relaxes and when Luisa slips two fingers into her she is _lost_.

Luisa knows exactly how to touch her – they are familiar lovers, if not as frequent as they would prefer – but Luisa is a fast study and a quick learner and her memory is near-photographic when she needs it to be. She breaks Rose apart with two fingers and the cup of her palm against her clit, and she does not hiss when Rose sinks her teeth into her shoulder to keep from screaming through her orgasm, because Luisa already knows that Rose is a biter.

And, as Rose slows down, down, sinks back into herself and Luisa’s lap both, Luisa strokes her until she twitches away in over-sensitivity and then draws her fingers free. She cannot help but look down at the mess, at the residual arousal on her fingers. She almost manages to raise them to her mouth to clean them off, but Rose steals her kisses for herself, instead.

She is slow and indulgent, all tongue and soft lips and hands grasping in Luisa’s hair.

When she draws away, again, her face is flushed and shining with perspiration.

“Better?” Luisa asks, and her smile is so cocky, but it has a right to be.

Rose nods her head, her breathing still uneven. She untangles her hands from Luisa’s hair and drags them down, down, to where the hem of her t-shirt has bunched up between them. Rose’s hands are warm and damp when she slides them beneath the fabric, up over Luisa’s stomach, to her breasts. Exactly where she wants them.

“I really want to go down on you right now,” she whispers, teasing Luisa’s nipples. “For, like, the rest of the night, maybe.”

Luisa grins even if she knows that they can’t. Not for the entire night, at least.

But, she has Rose in her lap, naked and sun-kissed with tan lines and freckles and just a hint of red crescent moons above her breasts, and the day has been _perfect_ —

Her bedroom door opens without warning, and Rafael steps quietly in.

“Lu, can I borrow your phone charger—”

He stops when he sees that Luisa is not alone. He is half-in, half-out of the room, uncomprehending, his mouth flapping with no words coming out. Rafael looks like he’s about to laugh, like he isn’t sure what he’s seeing, _who_ he’s seeing naked in his sister’s lap, like he hasn’t yet understood.

All of the colour drains from his face, and that’s when he sees red.

 


	6. Marriage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please see additional tags for further warnings. We're coming into Rose's backstory, next chapter, and it's going to be heavy.

“Rafael—”

“You’ve got to be _fucking_ kidding me.”

It is with absurd gentleness that Rafael disappears from view and closes the door on the pair of them. Luisa hears the click of it like the pin in a grenade having just been pulled, and her stomach lurches. She thinks she will be sick. She is not gentle when she moves Rose from her lap, but Rose makes her own hasty retreat to find her clothes and dress.

“Stay here,” Luisa hisses, and leaves in quick pursuit of her brother.

She takes the stone staircase two at a time, almost tripping in her haste, and whispers Rafael’s name as he unlocks the front door and steps outside. He leaves it swinging behind him, and Luisa does not care that she’s barefoot and barely dressed when she runs out after him, asks him, “where are you going?”

Rafael ignores her until he’s retrieved his phone charger from the rental car. Holds it up for her to see and then slams the car door shut again.

“Raf,” Luisa jumps, hands framing her mouth, “please, be quiet, you’re going to wake him up.”

“ _Wake him u_ p _?_ ”

Luisa’s hands are shaking, still cupped around her face, like she’s pressing in a scream. She’s never this risky, they’re never this _stupid_ , they have always only ever been careful. Rafael looks at her like he has too much to say, like he cannot pick just one curling insult because all of them – too many of them – are applicable.

(It is not an unfamiliar look on her brother’s face, it isn’t, but it’s never easy to see it when she thinks that he’s right, when she feels just the same, if she lets herself.)

For a moment, they’re both silent and watching each other, outside in the dark with the front door open behind them, and Luisa has no idea what to expect. If they were at the Marbella, Rafael would be able to walk away, would storm to a bar, or else she would. Here, they are almost as good as stranded up a mountainside, and his girls are asleep in the manor upstairs.

“Raf,” she says, again, because it’s really all she’s got, and Rafael turns away like he can’t even look at her.

“What are you thinking?”

She’s been asking herself the same thing, since he walked in on them.

Rafael takes several steps away, and then rounds on her.

“Rose?” he asks, disbelieving. “ _Rose_? You could have any— _anyone_ , Luisa, why are you— with her?” He makes a noise like all of his words are competing to leave his throat first, like they’ve crashed on the way, like a disaster. He holds the USB wire in a fist and shakes it to emphasise his point when he asks her, “Why?”

Luisa stares at him, unspeaking.

She could tell Rafael everything, from the very beginning, the very first night that she met Rose. She could divulge each painstaking feeling that she carries for her, and where would it get her? What good would it do them? She can tell, from the look on his face, that he is already judging her, that this is all he will see of her every time he looks at her, from now on.

“This is sick,” he says, when she doesn’t answer, and this more than any is a familiar sting.

 _Sick_ — just like her mother.

He doesn’t say it, now, but Luisa can see that he’s thinking it.

(She can see that everybody is thinking it, when she’s in a bad enough mind space.)

“You can’t just do this anymore, Luisa, this isn’t okay. You’re too old for this, now. What—are you trying to prove some kind of point, to get back at dad, I don’t—?” He stops, puts a hand to his face like he has a sudden migraine. “Is that what this is about?”

“No,” Luisa speaks, finally, shakes her head, shakes her whole self. “No, it’s nothing like that. I love her—I _do_ ,” when he scoffs and paces some more, like he has any idea what he had walked in on. “I know how messed up this is. I know that it shouldn’t have happened, but I’m not doing this to one-up dad, or annoy him, or anything disgusting like that.”

Rafael makes a face like, _really?_ and Luisa wants to hit him.

“It shouldn’t have happened like it has, but it did, and I can’t excuse it. I won’t excuse it.”

“What I just walked in on, that really wasn’t the first time this has happened, was it?” Rafael holds a hand up, shakes his head, when Luisa goes to answer. “Stop, I don’t actually want to know that. I don’t want to know anything more about this because it can’t happen, Luisa, do you understand that? Do you have any idea what he’d do, if he found out?”

Anger and indignation, and all of those other feelings that she maybe has no right to in this moment (maybe has more of a right to than _anybody_ ), climb up Luisa’s chest like heartburn.

“Of course, I do,” she says, and it sounds like a finger jabbing into Rafael’s chest, like she’s grabbing a fistful of his shirt. _Listen to me_ , it sounds like, and Rafael turns to her and he listens. “Why do you think we’re still hiding it? He’d ruin her.”

Rafael scoffs, unsympathetic.

“Really? You’re judging me this hard? Your track record with women isn’t exactly perfect.”

“At least none of them were my step-mother.”

“She’s younger than I am,” Luisa hisses, throws a hand up, because _Lord, help her_.

“So, that makes it okay?”

“No—no, it just makes it less weird, don’t make it weird like that, _god_.”

Luisa is frowning at him, and Rafael is frowning back, and this is usually where one of them will say something cutting and leave. They have always been able to lunge at each-others’ throats like this, it’s just the mercurial way of their sibling relationship. They know each other too well; they will always have the words to use when they mean to hurt one another at easy disposal.

“You don’t have to approve,” Luisa says, and Rafael mutters something beneath his breath that she misses and does not care for him to repeat. “I don’t care. I’m in love with Rose and nothing you can say to me now is going to change that.”

Rafael is quiet for a short stretch of time.

“You love her,” he says, and the way that he says it sounds wrong, like he’s not entirely sure that what he’s said is the truth. Like he knows better. Luisa wants to hit him, again. “And, you’re going to keep seeing her behind dad’s back, right?”

Luisa has no reason to lie to him, anymore. “Yes.”

“What kind of life is that, Lu?”

For a moment, the disgust and the anger and the disappointment falls away from him, and he’s just her brother.

“How are you going to live like that? And Rose—what, she’s just going to go to back to pretending that she’s happy as dad’s wife, while seeing you on the side? That’s not going to make you happy, that won’t be enough. It wouldn’t be enough for anybody. You keep telling me that you love her, but does she love you back?”

Luisa’s anger is quiet like a cold star. Rafael mistakes her silence for uncertainty.

“She’d leave dad for you, if she did.”

“And, I will.”

They both turn in sync toward the front door, where Rose is standing, watching them.

She has a habit of lingering in doorways to see what she will discover, Luisa realises. Maybe she should be a little frustrated that Rose hadn’t listened to her and stayed upstairs (hadn’t trusted that Luisa could handle this), but Luisa’s just tired and glad to see her— glad to not be alone, to have somebody else on her side. She relaxes some, as Rose wraps her wrinkled robe tighter around herself and steps outside to join them.

It’s Rafael who she directs her words to, when she speaks. “I will tell Emilio. I’m going to leave him, but right this moment isn’t a good time.”

Luisa knows before Rafael even reacts that it’s not the right thing to say. If anybody can recognise an excuse, it is somebody who has used them all, time and time again.

“When will be the right time?” he asks Rose. “My dad’s not going to just let you humiliate him like this.”

“Give me a chance, Rafael.”

“A chance to do what, exactly?”

Luisa looks between the pair of them, very much wanting to know, herself.

“To prepare him,” Rose says. “I’m his wife, I should be the one who tells him.”

Rafael nods his head. “Agreed. Tomorrow.”

“What?” Luisa says, and is about to continue into protest, when Rose touches her arm. She looks at Rose and her stomach drops, and her heart quickens, and she thinks she knows what this means, but she is too afraid to ask for confirmation. “Tomorrow?” she asks, suddenly short of breath, and Rose nods her head.

“Okay,” she says to Rafael. “I’ll tell him tomorrow.”

“Great. Oh, and you should organise a car or something, because the girls and I aren’t staying.”

Luisa momentarily closes her eyes. “ _Raf_ …”

“Okay,” Rose agrees, and she is deceptively calm – has been far too calm throughout this entire ordeal, in Luisa’s mind.

She does not look sorry to hear of Rafael’s premature departure, however, and Luisa can’t imagine that this talk with her father will go any better with her nieces present. They don’t deserve to see their _nonno_ like that. She doesn’t argue, then, or beg for Rafael to stay, even if a part of her wants somebody else there in the house with them when Emilio learns the truth.

“Okay,” Rafael repeats, and then he’s done.

He looks between the pair of them, then away in disdain, and makes his way back into the house. Luisa watches the door pull-to behind him, if not entirely shut, and a part of her almost wouldn’t be surprised if he’d just straight up locked them out. She stares after him for a moment, distracted by her thoughts, until Rose touches her arm.

When Luisa looks at her, there is something of a glow behind her face that isn’t entirely down to how hard Luisa had made her come, just moments before.

(That heated moment feels something of a lifetime away, right now.)

“Tomorrow?” Luisa asks, like she still needs clarification, and she does.

“Yes,” Rose says, and she lets herself smile. She takes Luisa’s hands in hers and steps closer, until they’re almost chest to chest. She looks, for just one brief flicker of a moment, uncertain. “Is that what you want?”

Luisa stares at her.

“Yes,” she blurts. “Yeah, that’s what I want, but—I mean, are you sure? _Tomorrow_?”

She has spent so long – too long – keeping their relationship a secret, that the thought of finally revealing it leaves her short of breath. It is what she wants, though, is what she’s wanted for years, for every time that she’s seen Rose in the sunlight, or combing her fingers through her hair, or frowning off into the distance, lost in thought, and hasn’t been able to tell her how beautiful she is, how much she loves her. She struggles to imagine a life where they’re not hiding, not constantly checking locked doors and closed curtains.

But, Rose is smiling at her soft and certain.

“This is all I want,” Rose tells her, and Luisa knows it’s the truth.

“Why now?” she asks, despite herself.

“I was waiting for the right moment.”

“And, that’ll be tomorrow?”

“Yes,” Rose says, and she’s so sure of herself that Luisa stops doubting her, too.

She squeezes Rose’s hands in her own and looks down at them, the way their fingers thread through one another.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight,” she says.

Rose looks at her, contemplative.

“I have something for that.” She drops one of Luisa’s hands and uses the other to tug her back toward the front door. “There’s something we need to talk about, too, before we tell Emilio.” Luisa’s hand almost pulls from hers when she stops walking, and Rose spins around to see her, eyes-wide. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Luisa says. “I just got a really bad feeling when you said that.”

Rose’s smile is apologetic.

“I love you,” she says, “and I want to spend my life with you.”

“You say that like there’s any possibility of me not feeling the same.”

“No,” Rose corrects her, shaking her head. “Maybe not. I just need you to know where I stand with you.”

“Seriously,” Luisa breathes, and her smile is weak and uncertain, “what horrible secret are you about to tell me that’s making you say all this, now?”

Rose’s face subtly blanches, and the smile falls from Luisa’s face.

“Let’s go inside,” Rose tells her, and Luisa follows her in.

 

Inside, they sit in one of the sitting rooms that they’ve never used since their arrival.

It’s cold and still dark, with a single lamp lighting the room, and Luisa hugs a mug of tea between both hands. “Aren’t you having one?” she had asked Rose, when it was passed to her, but Rose had only shaken her head. Luisa takes a sparing sip from it, now, and it tastes like chamomile and honey and what she thought pink blossom should taste like, when she was a child.

“What did you want to tell me?” Luisa asks, and while Rose had not used those words, exactly, she is intuitive – and she is right.

Rose sits a space away from her on the same couch, hands in her lap.

After a quiet pause, she says, “you know that your father isn’t my first husband.”

Luisa nods her head.

“Well, he wasn’t— by quite a long shot.”

“Rose, if this is where you give me your list of everyone you’ve ever slept with, you don’t have to. It doesn’t bother me. I mean, I’ve been with _plenty_ of women, myself, and I’m not at all ashamed of that. And, it’s not the man-thing, either. I don’t care who you’ve been with in the past; it doesn’t make me think any less of you.”

“I wish that was all this was,” Rose whispers, rubbing her temple. “Please, drink your tea.”

Luisa takes a distracted sip from the mug.

She feels her mind gently loosen.

“I won’t go into detail of every one of my marriages, but I should tell you of the first.” Rose stops there, and she is the picture of reluctance, but she softens when Luisa reaches across the distance and takes her hand. “It’s okay,” she says to the look of quiet concern on Luisa’s face. “I want to tell you, it’s just difficult, and I’m afraid of what you’ll think of me. I was a different person, back then.” She shakes her head, and her expression sours without her meaning for it to. “I was so young, I was barely a person at all, and I had a cruel mentor.”

The tea had been like a blanket to Luisa’s frayed nerves, but it does not quiet the alarm bells that Rose’s words set off in her mind.

“How young?” she asks, because the expression on Rose’s face _isn’t right_ , not for just an early marriage.

When Rose meets her gaze, she is a scared and tired thing. The fire behind her eyes is distant and too quiet, and Luisa instantly misses its warmth and familiarity.

“I was fourteen,” she says, and Luisa feels a small piece of reality disconnect itself from her, from them and the couch, from the manor at large. She feels cold. “He was a very wealthy man. A gentleman, with a grand estate and a title and so much land, and he was recently widowed. He had no heir and no surviving relatives, and so he had to re-marry. We didn’t court for long before a proposal was arranged, and I was expected to give him children immediately.” A flicker of something, then, in the very depths of Rose’s eyes. “Of course, my mother had already ensured that I couldn’t.”

By this point, Luisa’s grip on her hand has increased. Her expression is a sheet of horror, thinly masked.

“It was very important, you understand, that there were no loose ends.”

“I don’t understand,” Luisa says when there’s a natural pause. “Fourteen? I don’t—”

She cuts herself off with a noise, shaking her head.

“It was a different time, Lu.”

“What are you talking about?”

Luisa’s mind is sweet with the honeyed tea; her thoughts slosh around like the dregs in the bottom of a wine glass, like the room is gently moving around her. She thinks she’s misheard Rose, or misunderstood the story, but Rose is a stoic, still figure in the centre of all that spinning, dizzying movement, and she is not smiling like she’s playing a trick.

“It had never been my plan, in the beginning, is what I’m trying to tell you. I hadn’t wanted it, I hadn’t even properly understood what we were doing, and when I did, I just stopped caring. I was hurt and lonely, and I didn’t care that I was making other people feel the same. I _wanted_ them to feel that way, like I had. I was so bitter, Luisa, for so many years. I was so cold and lost until I met you.”

Her voice has turned the quietest shrill that Luisa’s ever heard it, and it hurts to hear it, it makes her own throat close tight like there’s a fist around it. Still, she shakes her head. Nothing of what Rose is telling her is making sense. Luisa knows this script too well, knows the lines even if they’ve never been her own, before. _Crazy_ , she thinks, and it’s a red-hot poker of a word that she tries not to touch, if she can help it.

As quickly as the impulse comes, however, Luisa dismisses it.

She won’t be that person. She _isn’t_ that person.

“When we met,” she says, because this part, at least, she can make sense of. She needs to make sense of what Rose is telling her. “At the bar?”

But Rose’s eyes glaze with unshed tears and she shakes her head.

“When we _first_ met.”

Rose is squeezing her hand so tightly that Luisa almost wants to drop it— wants to stand up and walk around and open a window, because she feels suddenly like she can’t breathe. There is a pounding behind her eyes that’s like no headache she’s ever felt, is not even really a pain, just an intrusive presence. Like a thought is forcing itself to the forefront of her mind, whether she wants it to or not.

And then there is Rose, scooting closer until she’s almost in Luisa’s lap, and the look on her face is needy and terrifying.

“Please,” she says, so gently, and lifts the hand that Luisa is holding her mug with – lifts it all the way to her mouth. “I need you to remember.”

Rose does not force her to drink it. She releases Luisa’s hands completely, but she’s never had to physically hold Luisa down to keep her. Luisa is lost to the blue of her eyes and the pleading look there; she sees herself in their reflection like she’s at the very bottom of a deep pit, and she wants to reach in and pull herself free.

She brings the tea to her lips and drinks.

 

* * *

 

 

Rose carries Luisa back to bed, that night, and lies with her while she sleeps.

Her anticipation is a sleeping beast inside her chest.

Years of waiting, of agony and isolation and wanting, are to finally reach their payoff. The undebatable fact of this alone brings her peace, as she lies by Luisa’s side and strokes her hair and watches her face, slack and soft in slumber. Her body sinks deep into the mattress, weighted down by a sense of catharsis.

Even in the dark of the room, Luisa’s presence is solid and bright as a star as she dreams of a past life.

Soothed, Rose closes her eyes and does the same.

 


	7. Inspired By (part 1)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here we are! As you can see, this should be the final chapter as per the fic week, but it ran away from me, so there's an 8th. I'll get that up tomorrow morning, as per the standard schedule. 
> 
> My Inspired By prompt has come from a short playlist that I've been listening to while writing this:[ Link Here](https://open.spotify.com/user/1156281317/playlist/1hAZGwfObkQg0OnI1sFW3g). I should also give credit to Sia's 'Fire Meet Gasoline' for inspiring the title of this entire fic, and again to [Ims0s0rry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ims0s0rry) for sending me a link to it when sharing Roisa songs. ^^
> 
> Again, a quick warning about the additional tags, this chapter is Rose's origin story and it is not pleasant.

[[YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS AGO]]

 

Rose’s earliest memory is of angels and her mother’s blue-lipped kisses.

It is a vast span of white nothingness and the falling snow that covers their footsteps even as they make them.

She is six years old and her mother is a frail thing. This is as far as they’ve ever walked together, and her father would have forbidden it had he known what they were doing, but her mother pushes Rose on like she means for them never to return home. Their skirts are wet and heavy and drag behind them, not made to sustain the weather like this. They walk a quickly filling trail away from the imprint of their bodies in the snow, where they had lain on their backs and waved their arms and legs, and laughed until they were breathless with cold.

(“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” her mother had asked, gasping for air. She’d looked ethereal in the sunlight, her red hair sweat-slick and then freezing against her forehead. “Your papa would keep us locked in that house, if he had his way.” She tugs on Rose’s hand, drawing her near, bending to her level. “The world will always try to keep you locked away, Clara Rose, for all of your life. You have to find the strength to fight it. Promise me you will fight it.”)

Rose tires easily and only her mother’s hand in her own keeps her from falling behind.

It is a long walk to their village centre, but everything looks different in the snow. They could be heading in entirely the wrong direction, and Rose would never know. The snow swallows the roads, turns the river hard, makes her eyes hurt just for being open. It seeps into her mother until the white of her skin is as white as both the ground and the sky.

They don’t make it far before her mother collapses, her breathing turning laboured.

She should not be out of bed, but it was with a wild look in her eyes that she had woken Rose, shaking her from sleep before the sky was light. She had told Rose to be quiet, and Rose, afraid, has not spoken since.

She speaks, now, as her mother lands on her knees, dragging Rose down with her by their joined hands – their fingers frozen tight together.

“Mama,” she says, clutching her.

“I just need to rest a moment,” her mother says, and so they sit in the quiet snow, until her mother’s laboured breathing slows.

 

Rose does not remember her father finding them, but she wakes during the cart ride back home, jostling in his lap.

His hands are scorching hot against her cheeks.

She’s wrapped in a blanket with him, flush against his chest, and she is so tired but he won’t allow her to fall back into sleep. When they return to the house, she is bathed and dried and wrapped again in blankets, and her father stays the night beside her while she shivers. He sits by her bedside until the fever is gone, until she can sit up and eat, and ask him where her mother is.

“Mama fell asleep,” her father tells her, “and she did not wake up.”

Rose will remember this, all those years and years later, as the day a plug was pulled from inside of her, and all the warmth began leaking out.  

 

* * *

 

 

When Rose is ten years old, her father re-marries.

Her new mother is a beautiful, cold woman.

“Girl,” she calls Rose, when she needs her, and Rose comes trotting to her side like a well-trained pet, glad of the attention.

 

 

Her father grows sick on the eve of the new year, when the snow is thick, and their land is starved and frozen. In the distance, the mountain peaks are lost to the white of the perpetually overcast sky. It is the harshest winter Rose has known, yet, made worse when her father collapses for the second time in as many days, and is taken to his bed.

Rose sits by his bedside and watches him lying beneath all those furs.

The fire in his room is lit and struggling to heat every corner. Rose’s fingers turn numb and stiff in her lap. Her father is sleeping or unconscious; she cannot tell the difference at this tender age. He could have died in the hour past and she would not have known. She sits there until her body is as hard and cold as the chair that she’s in, until the light fades from his window and her mother comes in to re-stock the fire.

Her mother is wrapped in fur and a cloying perfume that Rose is well-familiar with, already.

“Girl,” she says, when she sees Rose on the chair, blue-lipped and pale.

She touches a hand to Rose’s cheek. It is hot to the touch, and while Rose would not call her face kindly, it is extraordinarily beautiful – more so, in these last few months, as it has grown plump and pink and youthful. Though, soft as she may seem, Rose has come to expect better from her mother.

“You’re a sickly thing,” her mother says, pinching some colour back into her cheeks. “To bed with you, then. It’s late.”

Rose does not move.

She is a quietly defiant child, and she is frozen stiff to the spot, and desperate.

Her mother hesitates when she sees. “What is it?”

“Papa’s dying.”

Her voice is small but unwavering; her father has gone to sleep and he has not woken, not all day, nor the day before. She has sat by his side and watched the last of the light go out of him, like a dying flame. Her mother turns from Rose to her father, and does not dispute it.

She bends to Rose’s eye-level.

“Does it frighten you?” she asks her, and Rose considers her question. She nods her head, and her mother’s curiosity shrinks away, like all the light leaving her eyes. Her face is hard and cruel, again. “To bed,” she repeats herself, and looks none too pleased that she has to. She ushers Rose from the chair and her young body creaks like old wood.

That night, Rose lies in bed and knows that, come morning, she will be told that her father has passed.

She does not sleep.

 

* * *

 

 

Rose spends her eleventh birthday in bed.

Her body feels like a great weight has been seated on top of it, like a rock on her chest. Her eyes burn and her lungs ache when she coughs, when she breathes, when she is startled from sleep by the sound of her own laboured rasping. She can no longer sit up in bed without feeling a great loss of breath; the movement makes her nauseous, though there’s not enough in her stomach to allow her body to act on the impulse.

“It is the same fever that took her father,” she overhears her mother tell a doctor.

On the third day, her mother stands over her bed. She presses a cold hand to Rose’s forehead.

In Rose’s vision, she is an indistinct shape with dark hair and severe eyes. When she leans into Rose, she brings with her a mist of perfume.

“Sleep, girl,” she croons in Rose’s ear. “Stop fighting it and sleep.”

When she next falls into her subconsciousness, Rose finds a woman there with red hair and pale skin. They make angels in the snow together and she tells her, _fight, fight, fight_.

 

On the fifth day, the fever recedes.

Her mother presses a cool hand to Rose’s forehead and makes a curious noise.

“You’re stronger than I gave you credit,” she tells Rose, who is barely aware of what she’s saying. “But, you have always been a defiant girl, haven’t you?”

She studies Rose a moment longer.

“Very well,” she says, and leaves.

When she next returns, it is with water and soup and bread that settles heavily in Rose’s stomach.

 

By the seventh day, Rose finds the strength to stand. Her mother’s hand is a crutch beneath her arm.

 

* * *

 

 

Mother re-marries when Rose is twelve years old.

Her new father is an older man with greying hair. Her new home is much grander than the last, and she and her mother are spoiled with dresses and bonnets of the latest fashion. She becomes a quiet, pretty thing, and she sees her parents rarely. She is a play-thing for the nannies to dress up and style, and she is a reluctant student to the many tutors that become more familiar to her than her mother does.

It is a hot mid-summer night when her mother comes to her, dressed in her evening wear and alone. She rouses Rose from her bed with a thin hand at her shoulder. It is the first that Rose has seen of her mother in several weeks, and she looks weary. Her displeasure is obvious in the hand that sits like a vice on Rose’s shoulder, pushing her through corridors and into rooms that she has been told she has no business being in.

Her mother stops them in a dim room, lit by three tall candles.

There is a vanity table with many glass bottles and cloth bags upon it. Rose assumes they’re beauty products, until she realises that she is eye-level with a murky jar of sheep eyeballs.

“I have a very important lesson for you, girl,” her mother tells her. Her face in the mirror over Rose’s shoulder is gaunt and excited.

That night, she learns the very important lesson of proportioning and measuring, of how just an extra pinch of ingredients could ruin the entire brew. The night’s results go into two glass vials, tucked into her mother’s sleeve. It is too late when they finish, and her mother takes her down to breakfast with a single glass vial of viscous liquid. She slips it into a teacup like it’s honey.

“Bring this in to us,” her mother tells the kitchen staff, and she takes Rose to the morning table.

Rose does not dine with her parents often, but her presence goes unnoticed, like she isn’t there at all.

She sits in relative silence, but she has no stomach for the cold food in front of her. A server approaches with tea, and sets the teacup her mother had interfered with down in front of her father. Rose watches him, hyper-aware and exhausted, as he gradually drains the cup to the dregs.

By the end of it, he complains of a headache, and her mother turns to Rose and smiles.

 

The second lesson her mother teaches her comes in the early hours of the morning, when it’s still dark.

She creeps into Rose’s room with a candle, and Rose creeps back out again with her.

Her mother takes her to the room she shares, occasionally, with her father. Rose holds her breath as candles are lit and his sleeping body is revealed, a lump in the bed. He sleeps on his back, undisturbed. “Don’t be afraid,” her mother tells her, and she is not quiet. “He won’t wake up, I’ve made sure of that.”

“He’s dead?” Rose asks, aghast.

“Not yet, but not to worry.” Her mother produces the second glass vial from her sleeve. She shows Rose how she uncorks it without spilling a drop, then puts the glass to her lips and lets the honey substance slide down her throat. Rose is wide-eyed terror as she watches. A shudder runs through her mother’s body, an awful shiver; Rose cannot tell if she’s in pain or ecstasy.

The glass vial is discarded clumsily to the floor.

Rose watches in horror as her mother approaches the bed, as she straddles her father and sinks her hands into his chest, pinning him down. She leans over him and her eyes turn white and empty as she _sucks_ the life right out of him. Rose watches it leave his body like thin, white smoke, sliding up into her mother’s mouth.

The feeding lasts only a few short minutes, but Rose’s legs are unstable beneath her and she has begun to sweat. She leans into a dresser for support while her mother finishes, slipping off her father and standing. She rights all of her clothes and hair, and when she turns to Rose her eyes look vibrant and alive.

“Pity that he is old,” she tells Rose. “He will be empty after three more of these, if we are that lucky.”

She steps toward Rose, and Rose shrinks back.

“Do not fear me, girl, this is your legacy.”

Rose feels a deep coldness from the inside, like all of her bones were made from ice.

 

* * *

 

 

When the third and final glass vial is fed to her father on his deathbed, his lungs give a great rasping exhale, and he goes quiet.

There is a suddenness to the silence that fills the room; it feels profound and untouchable, and so Rose stands stock still by the bedside, alone and afraid to disturb his corpse. His body is still warm when her mother enters the room. She slips the contents of that second vial down her lips and leans over his chest, like a grieving widow.

Rose watches her mother gorge on the very last of his life force.

When she is done, she looks at Rose and smiles, _good girl_ , and it is over.

A pit of terror has sunk into Rose’s stomach, and it sits there heavy and cold as her mother approaches. There is a look in her eyes that Rose can only describe as frantic, like she has drunk too much wine and has too much restless energy at her disposal, like she’s lost all of those corporeal limitations and nothing could stop her from taking exactly what it is she wants.

(In Rose’s mind, this is a very accurate description of her mother. That pit of terror turns to cold fingers, grasping for her, taking from her.)

The awfulness of the moment, of her hand in the death of a man whom she may not have loved, but who had housed her, and fed her, and schooled her, stabs at Rose like a fist of panic clutching around her heart. She drops the empty vial on the floor and it shatters. Her mother startles at the noise, and as she grows closer Rose’s breathing turns erratic; she bats her away with swinging arms.

“Clumsy whelp,” her mother says, and Rose screams. “Control yourself, girl.”

“ _Witch!_ ”

Her mother slaps the temper right out of her, and Rose cowers where she’s fallen against the dresser.

The room is very still and quiet, until the door opens and serving staff rush inside, hailed by the noise. They look, stricken, between Rose and her mother, to her father’s body in the bed, and the shattered glass vial in the centre of the room. Rose thinks, for one awful, pleading moment, that they have been found out—that the madness will end here before she or her mother can do more damage, but the serving staff are still and quiet and afraid.

“Call the doctor,” her mother tells the elderly woman and the young man who have entered, “I fear my husband has perished in his sleep.”

The serving staff exchange frightened, suspicious glances.

“ _Quickly_ ,” her mother snaps, and they leave at once.

Rose sits by the dresser, still cupping her red cheek, her mother standing over her. The look on her face is quiet anger, is a promise of punishment, as she bends to Rose’s level. Her cold hands remove Rose’s from her face, and she examines the damage—seems pleased, that it will only bruise a little, and most likely not for long.

“Pack a bag,” she tells Rose, resigned, and stands. “They already had their suspicions, but now I’m sure you’ve confirmed them. We can’t stay.” She looks at Rose pointedly, _this is your fault_. “You are not quite what I would hope you’d be, by now, but no matter. You are a resilient girl and I have made plans for the two of us. Be ready to leave within the hour.”

Rose packs her bag with haste.

Her mother has never allowed her to see her fearful, before, but the look in her face as she had fled the room had come unsettlingly close. Rose pictures that, at any moment, men will appear at their door and arrest her and her mother. She imagines they will do much worse to them, afterward, and the fear of it makes her hands shake as she buckles the small travel case that she has hastily filled.

More than that, Rose shakes with the fear of what her mother has in store for them, once they have left.

She imagines it will be far worse than anything the village people and their laws could do to her.

 

* * *

 

 

Rose is fourteen years old when the potion her mother feeds her makes her sick.

She takes to her bed for three delirious days, and when she wakes up it is in a pool of her own blood and sweat.

Rose screams at the sight, of her bed sheets soaked when she stands from them, shaking and lightheaded. Her mother rushes in with a handmaiden who faints when she sees the mess. Rose staggers toward her mother and collapses against her side. She is dying, she thinks, only it will not be the peaceful death that she is so familiar with – she could not just go to sleep and never wake up, not after what she’s done.

“Quiet, girl,” her mother says, softly, softly, and she strokes sweat-slick hair out of Rose’s face. “It was a necessary precaution. You wouldn’t want to bare his brats, would you?”

Rose comprehends with a gasp. She pushes her mother away, and very nearly ends up on the floor from unbalancing.

“Is it permanent?” she asks, and her voice is so quiet, so young.

“Of course.” Her mother toes at the unconscious handmaiden with disdain. “We have a plan. Children were never part of that.”

Rose looks at her and wants to say, _I don’t want to marry him_. She does not want a husband, a grand estate, land, _wealth_. She does not want any of it, and she does not understand. Her mother must recognise the look on her face, for she nears her, with those gentle, tender hands, and cups Rose’s face.

“Oh, sweet girl,” she tells her, “I am so proud of you.”

She looks at Rose like she were from her own flesh and bone, her very own creation. She ignores Rose’s tears as they fall into her hands.

“You’re going to secure our future, aren’t you? You’re going to protect our family?”

And, Rose nods her heavy head.

When the handmaiden awakens, all apologies, her mother tells her, “fetch a tub and clean this up. Make sure that she’s dressed for dinner.”

Rose watches her leave the room, again. The blood is beginning to dry between her legs, and itches.

 

Rose frees herself at night time when the snow is thinning and clouds have cleared.

Lit by moonlight, she runs to the river.

In truth, Rose has contemplated escape before, but it had never been a likely option. She had been a child, and escape had been stealing her mother’s jewels and hiring a cart to the alpine borders, and never coming home again. Reinventing herself. Regaining her life. She is older, now, if not in years then in the pain that she bares—as daughter, as girl, as _wife_.

The world is a grasping hand that does not ask before it takes, this she understands, now, this she runs from as she plunges feet-first into freezing water.

(In truth, some part of Rose has always understood what _escape_ would mean, and this moment feels as inevitable as it does cathartic.)

She submerges up to her thighs, her hips, until the water is lapping at her empty, empty stomach, dragging her this way and that in its currents. She does not feel the cold for the stabbing pain that it causes her, and even that is muted, feels distant, feels like it’s not her own pain that she’s feeling, not her own body.

Rose closes her eyes asks that dark place behind her eyelids for the strength to walk further in, to submerge herself, to let the water take her.

(She can do it, she is strong enough.)

When she looks down into the moonlit water, her reflection is an angel with red hair and bright eyes, and a sickly dying voice that says, _fight, fight, fight_.

Rose startles.

She is making involuntary noises on each exhale, like a cry, like a whimper, like a scream.

She does not know, then, if she is helping or harming herself, when she walks her stiff body back to the riverbank— when she drags her heavy, icy-drying skirts back home.

 

* * *

 

 

Rose is twenty-and-two years old when her fifth husband breathes his last breath, and she has been twenty-and-two for a while.

Rose stands over his sickbed and muses on how life, like a creature with wings, has escaped her.

(No matter, she thinks, for she has her ways of claiming back what has been taken.)

The honeyed potion that slips down her throat always tastes the same, like sugar and tree sap. It gives her body the strength of a god, and she uses it to pull the life right out of her husband, until she feels fat with energy and youth—until he’s no longer her husband at all. Like she has just sipped from a sweet wine, Rose touches a finger to the corners of her lips, wiping away the wet excess.

When she rights herself, again, Rose considers the body in her marital bed.

He had been a young man with a past thick with tragedy, and she had made him happy, in some ways. He had been a strong man, too, and while his death had not come easily, it has been greatly anticipated by the townspeople. It will come as no surprise when she emerges a grieving widow, come morning, with his estate in her name.

(There are tricks to this that Rose has learned, after all these years. There are loopholes and grey areas and fat pockets to fill with gold, and she knows how to get her way.)

In a rare moment of peace, Rose sits by his bedside and considers him.

She considers how different she really is from his corpse, if she is different at all.

“I am still fighting,” she tells him, as it’s the only difference that comes to mind.

 

* * *

 

 

Rose still sees her mother.

It is her own wealth that her mother manages, that she stores safely away for each and every time that they must leave their current residence, and they must leave often to keep from suspicion. Over the years, they grow older without growing old, like flowers being kept on ice, adding to their wealth and knowledge.

Rose looks around her rooms, one day, in a new house that she is barely familiar with, at all of her belongings that she has both bought new and kept with her from decades past.

She could fill a small museum with what she has collected, if not in material items then in grief, in pain, in sorrow, and misery.

She wonders how her existence can be this empty, when it’s filled to the brim with _stuff_.

 

* * *

 

 

Rose avoids social gatherings when she can.

When she cannot, she ensures that she’s the most beautiful creature present, and it does not go unnoticed.

Tonight, she has no patience for the festival, and her mother’s overbearing presence is beginning to stir a headache to the very forefront of her mind.

She escapes the crowd to find a room that she should not be in, in a house that is not her own, but it is so large that she’ll likely never be found. Her luck runs short when a door opens on her, where she’s half-perched on a desk with a book between her hands. She recognises the woman who has entered as wife of the man who owns the estate, a woman who has taken considerable interest in Rose and her curiosities, of late, and her expression falls into instant and deep apology.

“Come, now,” the woman tells her, and Rose should have learned her name, but it rarely ever seems important. “You’re the prettiest thing here and by far the most miserable. Don’t worry, I won’t force you out of hiding, if the party bores you so.”

“Not that it bores me,” Rose says, and it is a lie, and they both know it.

“No, I hardly blame you—but there are better, more enjoyable things for we simple womenfolk to entertain ourselves with, while our husbands drink too much downstairs and ogle the staff as though we have not eyes in our heads to notice them.”

Her smile is nothing short of enchanting, in that moment, that Rose cannot help but return it.

“Now, I’m intrigued,” she says, and does not understand why she feels suddenly breathless as her host draws near. Slender fingers take the novel from Rose’s hands, turning it over so that she might admire the cover, but her eyes do not leave Rose’s face. “One of yours?” Rose asks, as the novel is taken from her and set back down again on the desk behind her.

“Not the entertainment I had in mind, no.”

Rose does not startle when a soft mouth presses against her own. She is far too old for surprises, but the quickening of that neglected muscle inside her chest gives her pause. She is aware of her own heartbeat for the first time in years, and with it comes a simple, awful truth – a truth that she has not considered, earlier, but which makes so much sense now that she has.

It comes with a keen understanding for why she has had no desire for the men that she has taken to bed, why the very idea of it repulses her, even during the act itself, even when the men themselves had not particularly disdained her.

(She has never touched skin so soft or kissed lips so plump, or _felt so much_ in all her long life.)

Oh, Rose thinks, this is the tender thing that she has been told about, has read of, and scoffed at. She has been looking for it in all of the wrong places.

In a single beat of her heart, Rose _understands_. In the next, she feels the world like a thousand cold knife-tips against her skin.

Of course—of course, she would find it, and it would be so _impossible_ , so _forbidden_.

(No matter, she thinks, as she sinks into supple, soft flesh and hands gentler than any that have touched her before.

This is just another slip of pain that she will carry. It is just one more reason for why she must punish the world.)

 

When Rose returns home that night, she finds her mother still awake and in her bed.

“Why have you packed?” her mother asks, noticing the bags at her feet.

Rose takes a seat by her mother’s bedside. She is a beautiful woman, still, and she looks little different than she had the very first day that Rose had met her, save the current styles of the decade. Her appearance stirs up no affection within Rose. Her presence there at the late hour, or else the look on her face (the resoluteness in her eyes), silences her mother.

“You would do well to understand how much I’ve done for you, girl. You would do well to show your gratitude.”

Rose considers her.

“You have ruined my life,” she says, simply. “You have turned me into a wretched creature.”

“Running from me will not reverse that.”

Rose feels the power of those words, like tight hands around her wrists, holding her down. She rubs at her arms, unthinking, as though she expects to feel the indent of shackles there—and, truly, it would not surprise her if she did. The power of those words, she understands, comes from their truth.

“Perhaps not,” she concedes, “but I am still leaving, Elena.”

It is the first time in half a century that Rose has address her as anything other than mother, caretaker, _caregiver_.

It feels a lot like using her own voice for the first time in just as long.

 

* * *

 

 

It is by special chance that Rose finds herself in Italy.

She is not perfectly fluent in the language, but she makes it a habit to practice. A fair sum gives her a room in a well-respected inn, indefinitely, and for the first time in her life, her time is her own. Rose is stumped by the revelation. She spends the first week wasting the days with long walks and afternoons spent sitting outdoors and reading. In that first week, she tans and freckles and feels the inertia of so many years begin to slowly thaw beneath the hot Italian sun.

The locals are common gossips, but it is nothing Rose has not faced before, well-travelled as she is.

She weathers them with grace.

Time in the village passes quickly, and before long she is both a common topic and a common guest at the village people’s tables. Rose has little need for company, and it is only with half-hearted effort that she charms an older, wealthy man. Her habits are so ingrained in her, she sometimes doubts she will ever be able to stop; it is security, if nothing else, (and just a little fun, if she is honest with herself).

Emilio is smitten with her affections, but then Rose had known he would be, when she’d first seen him.

She is a dreadful woman to woo, a difficult potential romance, and she makes him work for it. He has the respect of the village, even if they all have their fair share of stories to tell about him, and what little wealth she had taken with her when she left her mother is beginning to deplete. He is an easy target, and she is a witch, and she has been trained from too young an age to spot a good opportunity and take advantage of it, for her to ignore this one when it rolls onto its back at her feet.

Their courtship is inevitable.

That Emilio has a daughter, close to her in her apparent age, means little to either of them.

Rose does not visit the house, if she can help it, and the Solano heir is something of a recluse, as the locals tell it. Rose pictures her a spinster, an ugly, or sickly thing that knows already only a slither of what Rose has learned about the world and its inner workings. She does not go out of her way to meet the potential future step-daughter— given her history, she thinks that’s for the best.

Her surprise, then, when she first sees the other woman, is momentous.

 

Rose does not care for dinners or the energetic conversations that she struggles to keep up with (tunes out), and she slips away from the table once the food has been cleared and something finer to drink has been produced. The Solano manor is a bleak, ominous building, dimly lit and cool even in the mid-summer.

It is exactly big enough to become lost in, if she wishes to, but the promise of the warmer night air outdoors lures her toward a window.

(She is like a snake, these days, like a cold-blooded reptile searching for heat that she’s denied herself for far too long.)

From her position, tucked into a nook in the kitchen where the serving staff pay her little attention, Rose spies the moon and the ring that halos around it. The sight promises a terrible omen, and it makes Rose smile, as there’s little worse that she thinks can happen to her life, by now. Rose prepares to make her way outdoors, and that’s when she spots the unmoving figure among the garden foliage.

The night is almost too dark for Rose to make out the neat updo or the slender shoulders, just too far revealed, but then the woman turns her face into the moonlight and Rose _sees her_.

It is like that moment in the library, again. Rose clutches at a kitchen worktop as her footing falters. It is the Solano girl, of this she’s sure, for who else would look so comfortable in the shadows than the enigmatic character in the villagers’ tales? Rose _sees her_ and she loses her breath, and the last of that cold, hard thing inside of her hisses as it ignites.

Curiosity takes her closer, with a candle in one hand, and it is only curiosity, she tells herself, it will come to nothing.

The night is warm, as she had suspected, and it’s always pleasant for Rose to step into.

She nears the figure in the foliage, seated on a bench, she now sees, and watches as the candle that she’s holding dances bright within the Solano girl’s eyes. When she looks at Rose (and, she looks at Rose, in all of the places that Rose expects to be looked at), Rose feels her gaze like heat is spreading through her muscles, through every starving inch of her skin.

“I thought I saw a figure,” she says.

Her companion studies her with interest. “It is easy to see why my father wants to bed you.”

Rose smiles at her own surprise.

 _Yes_ , she thinks, _you know the world and you’re as jaded with it as I am_.

There is obvious surprise in the dark eyes that watch her, when Rose takes a seat on the bench, placing the candle between them. The flame flickers and jostles at the move, but persists. Lit from the beneath, with the soft orange glow, the Solano girl is every temptation that Rose suspects fate could ever lay at her feet.

There is a reason for the ring around the moon, and Rose understands it when those same dark eyes peruse her with nothing short of _interest_.

Oh, but this will be her downfall, and Rose has wanted nothing more.

 


	8. Inspired By (part 2)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory reminder that the additional tags have updated. Please check for warnings.

[[YEARS AND YEARS AGO]]

 

Rose falters as she steps down from the carriage into humid, mountainous mist.

She loses her footing and, with a cloth tied around her eyes and her hands bound by rope, falls into the rich Italian soil.

Blind though she is, she does not need to see to recognise her prison. The earth has always tasted more acidic in the air, this high up the mountain, especially after heavy rainfall. With one sense obstructed and the others overcompensating, she can almost smell the cold stone of the Solano manor, almost feel the imposing stature of it lurking over her like a waiting beast. The wind in the trees is like a familiar lullaby, something she might have once sang herself. She feels the cool touch of it against her skin, in her hair, like it’s welcoming her back.

She knows this place, she knows it down to her aged bones and right through the cracks in them.

This place where she’s been brought, it’s _Luisa_.

Even without the other woman here (and Rose has to clamp her teeth shut, has to draw blood from her own tongue and repeat her incantations silently within her mind, to keep from screaming for her), it’s all Luisa. Rose smells the garden where she first saw her, the damask manor in which they first made love.

She feels Luisa like a wind that rushes over her, draws up every loose hair, powerful and elusive.

Rose is too slow to right herself, and a rough hand grasps her by the shoulder.

She is pulled to her feel and pushed in the direction that they want her to walk in. There is more than one of them, although only one hand keeps a constant hold at her shoulder, guiding her. Even now, bound as she is and at his mercy, Emilio is afraid of her slipping through his fingers like she’s made of sand.

(Rose is made of finer things than silk and glass, and he had seen it in her from the beginning, he knows when and how to take precaution.)

She is moved through the manor house, taken up and then down steps, to where the stone is cold instead of cool, where the air tastes almost as old as she is. Rose does not fight the hands that lie her upon a table – wooden, longer than her full body – or the leather straps that keep her there. She has never been physically restrained like this, before, and yet as she tests her new limited range, she finds that it is not all that unfamiliar.

Finally, the blindfold is removed.

The cellar is dimly lit by candlelight and makes her vision strain.

She sees two men – Emilio, the first, and a taller surgeon who rolls out his medical kit on a bench that has been placed directly within her view. Rose considers his equipment coolly. She is no stranger to intimidation, whether from being its victim, or wielding it in her own hands, and she is unimpressed. There is so little that they can do to her, now, when they’ve already burned her heart to ash on those dusty village streets.

“Darling,” Emilio addresses her, stepping into view, “you remember Dr. Ellson?”

She has sat at dinner tables with this man before. Although she does not remember engaging him in conversation, she has heard plenty of him from the gossips in the village— that he is an Englishman from a well-respected family, and that he has travelled a great distance throughout Europe, bleeding out witches and their ill-begotten thralls.

He is new to the village, but his sensationalist views have taken the rotten lot of them by storm.

Ellson regards her now with eyes as cold and black as a raven’s – one dark creature assessing another.

He has been at the forefront of the investigation surrounding her, and she knows from regretful experience just how cold his narrow fingers are, just how like a perished, newly-discovered animal he had treated her body during the inspections. He had made her feel like something to pull apart, look into, dissect.

“Dr. Ellson will be conducting your trial today,” Emilio continues, moving closer. His breath is bitter and warm against her face. “You will agree he is best qualified to handle this investigation?”

“Trial?” Rose asks, and her voice sounds light and empty, like it could just blow away. “For what am I being tried— for loving your daughter?”

Emilio’s face reddens. “For unholy practices. For devil-worship.”

“No, no devil.” She meets his gaze. Of all the men’s beds she has shared, his is the most regretful. “There has been only one woman whom I have worshipped, and she was the fairest woman I have ever met. Or would you call her a devil, to hold yourself in such high regard as God Himself, for creating her?” 

“Pretty words,” Emilio muses. “It is that serpent tongue that got to my Luisa.”

“You have no idea what this tongue has done to Luisa.”

The slap rings over-loud in the tightly confined space, and Rose begrudges how it makes her eyes water from the sting.

She blinks the moisture from them as Emilio lowers himself back into her face, appearing closer after each brief interval of black from behind her eyelids. The look in his eyes, she thinks, is as dead as her own, but for too many different reasons. In the dimly lit room, she can see the hints that he is still recovering from the belladonna poisoning; he perspires even in these cooler temperatures, and his eyes are veined with red.

“Mind yourself, my dear,” he says, lowering the gravel of his voice to a sibilant hiss. He looks at Rose the way that Elena had first looked at her, on her sickbed when she was just a child— like she was not just a girl but a weapon waiting to be sharpened, and she _had_ sharpened. “Do not give the doctor reason to cut your tongue out before he can conduct his interrogation.”

Rose meets his gaze, unblinking.

“He may try.”

She feels Emilio’s will against her own, pushing, pushing, unrelenting, but she has more practice with this particular muscle, and he is the first to break. As he moves, his gaze is caught by the table of equipment. He picks up a piece that has piqued his interest, a phallic cylindrical object with handles. When he squeezes on them, the phallus opens like a slowly-blooming metallic flower, with three rusting petals. Emilio presses the device into Ellson’s hand as he passes.

“Make her talk,” he grunts, “and remind me why I should not have had her killed, already.”

 

* * *

 

 

Rose loses time to the dark cellar and the brief intervals of consciousness in which Ellson has his hands, and all of his sharp little tools, upon her.

He pokes and he prods and he makes her bleed, and through it all she is tight-lipped and absent. She has already left this table and the restraints that hold her corporeal body down; she is both inside her own mind and outside of it. She is making angels in the snow, and she is walking into a freezing river, and she is burning bright as the sun above Luisa’s naked body, and she is untouchable. This part of her, this piece, it’s hers and she’s already learned to safeguard it from the greedy grasping hands of the world.

Ellson’s will pales in comparison to that.

He can take from – _cut_ from – her body, but he will never touch her, here.

 

One day, he wipes a spec of her own blood from his beard with a soiled cloth, and says, “this will all stop, if you confess.”

Rose levels him with a stare.

“You will tire of this before I do.”

 

Naturally, she is correct.

They wait until her body has been drained, until she struggles to hold her own head up, until she is dizzy and delirious with hunger. She overhears their conversations like she’s already six feet beneath loose soil, but she hears them, and when Ellson comes to loosen her restraints alone, she drives one of his own tools into his throat. He makes a startled gurgle as blood ruptures from the wound, coating the two of them, and his eyes are wide and mad as he falls against her.

She lets him register his mistake— that _she_ is the one who has been waiting for _him_ to tire, not as he had presumed.

Rose supports him against her battered body and takes them both down to the cold, stone floor, unstable. She holds him as he sputters, as he coughs blood into her face and down her exposed collar, where it runs hot and red over her ribcage. She has not damaged anything significant, has clipped an artery, perhaps, but not completely severed it. Were there a proper doctor present, he might easily survive the wound, but shock has floored him.

Privately, Rose wonders if he’s ever seen so much of his own blood before, and doubts it.

“Worry not,” she whispers to him, and she could sound so sweet if her voice were not so chapped and dry, “this wound will not kill you.”

She leaves him there on the floor, and it is a test to her own character, as well as his, that of the two of them, she is the one who has the strength to walk out of the cellar. Rose looks back once when she has cleared the threshold, to where Ellson has wrapped a bloodied hand around the object still protruding from his throat. His fingers slide away from it, struggling for purchase, and he blanches and croaks in pain.

She waits just long enough to see the fear in the whites of his eyes as she closes the door on him, as she bolts the lock right after.

Rose leaves him there to rot.

 

The manor is quiet for her when she stalks up the cellar steps, her feet bare and battered and leaving damp imprints wherever they touch.

She feels the stone walls around her like she is walking through the skeletal ribcage of a giant’s corpse. It is empty, without the warmth, without the light, without _Luisa_. She tucks another of Ellson’s tools into her hand, the unsharpened edge of it resting upwards against the inside of her wrist— concealed.

Her legs give, twice, while she is taking the steps up to the first storey. She presses on.

Rose is bruised and bleeding from still-open wounds, she is clipped and burned and still burning – she holds that fire tight to her, now, like it’s her salvation, like it’s all that’s left of her, like she’s waiting to burn the whole world down with it. She pays the screaming pain of her body no thought, but to acknowledge it. The cuts will scar, and the scars will fade, and Rose has many tricks up her sleeve for masking damage – physical or otherwise.

Right now, her mind is knife-edge focused; she has only one objective, and her body understands, even as it aches.

It does not fail her.

She comes to the door of Emilio’s room and pauses there, listening. It had been her bed, too, once they were wed, but the room itself had never felt like her own. There was never comfort there, never peace, not like the solace she had found in those stolen hours that she had spent in Luisa’s arms. Rose touches fingertips to the door handle, now, and it pushes gently open with little pressure.

She had not brought a candle with her from the cellar, and Emilio has not kept one alight while he sleeps.

Still, the shutters have been left open, and weak light illuminates the shape that he makes in the bed.

Her husband, a proud man, he has underestimated her. What had he been thinking? Rose wonders. The unlocked door, his unguarded rest. Emilio sleeps with the utter lack of concern of somebody who has already won—who has already slain the beast, not simply left her wounded and thirsty for blood. Rose feels insult, vague as a stray thought, at being underestimated so.

 “You always did overlook those truths that you wished not to believe,” she whispers as she takes his hand.

Emilio does not stir even as she splays his limb palm-down on the wood-carved bedside table, and drives the surgeon’s tool straight through it.

It is the noise that wakes him. Emilio startles and splutters at seeing her; he tries to grab for her and then realises that he is restrained. Rose sees the moment that he notices the metal spike sticking through his hand, and there is grim satisfaction in his shout as the pain finally registers. He tries to rip his hand free, but she has buried the spike deep, and he is winded by shock.

Determined, Emilio lunges from the bed as far as he can travel, grasping for her with his free hand, but Rose has only to step aside and just out of his reach for the move to prove ineffective. He lands loudly on the floor, cursing in pain, and Rose watches him as he tries to recover—as he tries to draw the spike out of his hand.

“You will only make it worse,” Rose coos, but her voice is the scratch of bark and nails and dried up weeds.

She nears Emilio, and he grasps for her again. She allows him to take purchase of her throat, even as she lowers herself in his lap, and it is her unwavering, inhuman strength and the strain of his own agony that makes his fingers shake around her. He meets her cool blue eyes and his own fill with fear at what he sees there.

“What are you?” he rasps, and Rose smiles.

She places her hands on his shoulders and sinks her fingers into him until he shouts with pain, again. The feeling is indescribable – unadulterated, uninhibited possession. She feels Emilio’s fear around him like a honey-sweet cloud, and she cannot help but draw it from him like she has the lives of all of her previous husbands, like she had planned to, all that time ago.

The taste of him is intoxicating. She wonders, briefly, why she has never done this before, when they are still awake, when they are still alive, when they can see her for what she is and she can taste the _certainty_ of their own death as she peels it away from them. She does not want to stop, but she must— she needs his heart still-beating when she cuts it out.

Rose ends the feeding with a gasp, and Emilio sags against the side of the bed.

His hand has fallen loose around her neck, but she does not bother to remove it.

He watches her, dizzy, as she glows above him with the same life that she has just stolen, and he frowns when no more comes.

“Oh, you did not think it would be that easy?” she asks him, recognising the confusion. “I’m not just going to kill you, dear husband. I have one last request for you before I do that, and it will not be a gentle thing that takes you, when we’re finished. Would you expect any less?”

Emilio croaks around a question that he no longer has the strength to ask, and Rose shushes him, soothes him, silences him. She does not need him to speak, now.

“You took somebody very precious from me,” Rose says, and her eyes glisten, and her eyes _burn_. “Now you’re going to bring her back.”

She moves one hand from his shoulder, to the rapidly beating muscle inside his chest. Emilio tries to follow her gaze; his eyes are blown-wide with fear and madness, and his face is ashen. Rose presses her fingernails through his nightshirt, hard enough to pinch, almost hard enough to break the skin, and smiles when he winces and his heart beats ever quicker against her palm.

“All I need is her blood, but you made sure to see that there was none of that, didn’t you?”

(Still, inside of Rose, a voice is screaming in raw disbelief. He had murdered her— he had _burned her alive_.)

A muscle ticks in Rose’s throat, like a snake preparing to dislocate its jaw in preparation of a meal. She looks at him, hungry and detached, and Emilio shrinks in terror.

“But her blood is your blood, and I will bring the loathsome lot of you back, if I must.”

She sinks her fingers through his chest, and pulls.

 

* * *

 

 

 

[[THE PRESENT]]

 

The room is cool and quiet when Luisa wakes.

She stretches and checks the time on her phone, and sits up in surprise when she sees that it’s already noon. She sets the phone back on the bedside table, beside a glass of fresh water, and sits. There is a stillness to the manor – a quietness that she would call unnerving, if she didn’t already know the reason behind it.

Rafael has left, then, and taken the girls with him.

She stands, finally, and draws a robe around her as she takes the seat at her vanity table. As if by reflex, she reaches for the necklace with the little cornicello charm dangling from it, and fastens it around her neck. It is only when she sees herself in the reflection of the mirror that she realises what she’s done, and the world stops, falters, slips right off its axis.

Luisa stares at herself in the mirror, at the same face, and eyes, and look of utter bewilderment.

She is herself.

She is— _herself_. This life, and the last, stare right back at her in perfect duality, asking her what comes next.

Luisa feels herself stop breathing.

It is with a screech from the seat against the hardwood floor that she stands, almost knocking it over. Luisa propels herself out of the room, down the corridor, through the house that is so familiar and suddenly so unfamiliar – so _changed_ from how she knows it should be, how it had been, all those years and years before. It is barely the same building, and Luisa struggles against unrecognition, and the feeling that she had never left.

She takes the stairs in a haste, almost trips down them, and bursts into the kitchen like she is half afraid of what she’ll find there—or what she won’t.

But, there Rose is, like she hasn’t dreamed her up, sitting at the breakfast table with coffee and an empty plate.

She startles at Luisa’s entrance, but her expression softens.

Luisa feels something between them, like a spike of adrenaline and anticipation, a red thread that joins from one to the other, and she follows it all the way to where Rose is sitting. She stands there, not sure what to do, what to say, and Rose tries to stand with her, but her quiet, “Luisa?” provokes a reaction, finally, and Luisa lunges for her.

Before Rose is sure of how to react, Luisa is in her lap, arms tight around her shoulders, her face buried against her throat. She lets out a great breath, like she has been unable to breathe since she first realised that she _knew_ , that she _remembered_ , and clings to Rose, and Rose lets her. She wraps her arms around Luisa, just as tight.

“I don’t understand,” Luisa moans against her neck.

She draws back, and she is crying. Rose is crying, too.

“I don’t understand,” she says, again. “I have—these memories. Am I losing my mind?”

“No,” Rose tells her. She presses gentle palms to Luisa’s cheeks. “No, that’s right, you’re remembering.”

“ _How_?” Luisa looks stricken. “What happened—? My _dad_ —and _you_ —”

She stops, suddenly, her breath shuddering until it quiets, again.

Luisa looks at Rose, and she is calmed by her own intrigue. It is not fear that has her searching Rose’s face, has her frowning. She touches fingertips to Rose’s jaw, to the curve of her ear, tucking loose hair back behind it. She looks at Rose like she is just now recognising her for what she is, and it stuns her that this is the first time that she’s seeing it, that she hadn’t just _known_ when she’d first seen her.

Rose has always been too great and too big and too much for this world, and Luisa had not realised just how true this is, until now.

She sounds almost reverent when she asks, “what are you?”

Rose captures Luisa’s hands in her own, bringing them down between them.

“It’s me,” she says. Her voice quakes. “It’s always been me.”

Luisa’s frown relaxes. It’s enough, for now. “I know,” she says, and realises that she means it.

She presses her forehead to Rose’s and for a moment, they’re at peace. For the first time in centuries, an aching, raw thing is set free and soothed, and all the world is better for it. In the space between them, limited and warm with their synchronised breathing as it may be, questions and answers materialise and dissipate just as quickly.

There will be time to ask them, later, but for now—

Luisa is the first to draw back, opening her eyes.

“What now?” she asks. “My dad?”

Luisa sees the moment that Rose’s gaze hardens, and she regrets speaking, instantly, regrets bursting that moment of calm. But, her father sleeps on the floor above them, and Luisa’s mind may be fraying at the edges, but she understands the danger that he is in. A small voice, one of many that argue against her, accepts the truth of this and does not want to change it.

Other voices, louder, remind her that he is her father, still.

“I have a plan,” Rose says, and she sits up straight until Luisa takes the hint and moves off her.

Rose paces the kitchen, a moment, gathers her thoughts. Luisa leans back into the table and watches her.

“It’ll be easier, without Rafael here,” Rose continues, “I’ve already got measures in place to take care of him, and we’ll be out before he’s found.” She turns back to Luisa. “You’ll need to pack, of course, and it’s best that you call Rafael before we go, because I don’t know how long it’ll be before you’ll next get a chance to.”

Luisa opens her mouth to protest, but Rose raises a hand, like she’s thought of everything.

“You’ll want to call him, Lu, you really better had. We both know you’d regret it. I’ll give you time alone, while I’m—”

“No.”

Rose stops, looks at her.

Luisa is standing against the table, still, her arms crossed and a look on her face that brokers no dispute.

“What?” Rose asks, and Luisa repeats herself.

“No.” She uncrosses her arms, leans away from the table, steps towards Rose. “I said, no. I can’t let you do this to him, I won’t.”

Rose looks at her, stunned. She makes a noise of protest, loses it somewhere in her throat, and her cheeks turn faintly pink. She had not expected this. “But—” she sputters, flicking hair away from her face. “But, after what he _did_ to you.” She is seething, suddenly, because anger has always been easy to grasp, easy to take a hold of, so close at hand. “Luisa, what he _did_ to you,” and her voice breaks.

“I know.”

“I don’t think you do,” Rose scoffs, “or else you wouldn’t try to stop me. _He_ —”

“I know, Rose,” louder, now, cutting Rose off completely. Silencing her. Luisa looks at her with eyes years older than they have any right to be. “I know,” she repeats, “I remember it. I remember every single part of it, believe me, I understand exactly what he did, and I’m,” she stops, wets her lips, struggles. “I’m trying to come to terms with that. I’m trying to compartmentalise that life from this one, and I feel like I’m going insane, Rose, it’s too much.”

Rose’s expression falls into concern. She takes a step forward, but Luisa’s shaking head pacifies her.

“I need time to process all of this, you have to give me that,” she tells Rose. “And, that means _not_ killing my dad and running away, and following whatever plan it is that you’ve thrown together.”

“You have no idea how long I’ve had to think of this,” Rose tells her, and all the life seems to have sagged out of her, dragging her posture down. “You can’t imagine how long I have had to put these pieces in place, waiting for the _stars to align_ for you to even show up here again. I have it perfect now, Luisa, I know exactly what to do – it’s all waiting for us.”

“I don’t want it.”

It’s said so plainly that Rose can’t argue against it. Still, she releases a tormented noise.

“Don’t you love me?” she asks, and it is pitiful. “Don’t you want to be with me?”

 _After all I’ve done_ , sits between them, like lead in the air, blocking something. Luisa blows it away with a sigh.

“Of course, I do,” she says, and she is the one to close the distance between them, again, taking Rose’s hands in her own. “Of _course_ , I do, Rose. But that—running away? That’s not what I want for us. Haven’t we spent long enough constantly looking over our shoulders, waiting to be caught?” She looks up at Rose and she is so open, so giving, so generous, even now; the love pours out of her like it’s endless, like it’s unconditional, because it is. “Don’t we deserve better than that?”

“But, he—” Rose stops herself, chokes. “I can’t let go of what he did. You weren’t there, afterwards. You _weren’t there_ , Luisa, for so long.”

She does not realise that she’s crying until Luisa wipes the tears from her cheeks. She takes a great, staggering breath, and forces herself to calm, presses the tears back in again. They can wait—there will be time.

“I know, I’m sorry,” Luisa says, and Rose thinks she will cry again. She shakes her head, _no_.

“I missed you so much. For so long, I had nothing but the hope that this would work, that I’d see you again.”

“You had so long to plan your revenge,” Luisa tells her, cupping her cheeks, “but you have to make a choice. You brought me back here, didn’t you? You did that for me, for _us_ , not for him. You need to decide, now, which is more important, Rose. I can’t stop you from killing him, and I can’t say he didn’t deserve it, once, in that past time, I can’t say that I’d have been sorry if it happened, back then.”

“It did,” Rose whispers, and something of a shiver slips down Luisa’s back. “It did, once, and it wasn’t enough.”

“Will it be, this time, if you do it again?”

Rose, caught off guard by the question, is silent.

“It’s what he deserves,” she says, after a moment.

Luisa closes her eyes. After a brief quiet, she asks, “what will happen to him, if we just leave, now?”

When she opens her eyes, again, it’s to see Rose’s expression—perplexed.

“He’d wake up,” she says. “He’d be confused and unwell, but he would recover.”

“No lasting damage?” Luisa asks, suspicious, and Rose looks momentarily away.

“I wanted him to suffer, slowly, but I wanted to be the one who stopped his heart, again, myself.”

Luisa swallows against the mental image.

“Okay,” she says, losing her voice, and clears her throat. “Good. That’s good. That means there’s still time for you to stop this.” Rose looks as though she’s going to protest, but the expression in Luisa’s eyes stops her. There is something final about the way that she is looking at her, something unwavering. It tastes like an ultimatum in the air between them. “Because, I can’t go with you, if you do this. You can get your revenge, or you can come with me, and we can give this a shot, properly.”

There is so much to process, still, _too much_. It will take time. It will take _years_ , it feels like, now, but she imagines each and every one of them by Rose’s side, and would not regret it. Her mind goes quiet in the midst of all that confusion, all those questions and memories and the blurred identities that may never neatly settle into one another, and she watches Rose make her decision.

In the end, her choice is as easy and predictable as the rising and setting of the sun.

“Then, I choose you.” She puts a hand to Luisa’s jaw, feeling her pulse strong and steady in her palm. “I’ll always choose you.”

 

* * *

   
  


They leave Emilio the rental car.

Luisa places her handwritten letter on the breakfast table, for him to find. It is not the goodbye that she wants to say, but she is not ashamed to admit that she is afraid of what would happen, were she to wake him. It’s not just her and Rose’s safety, now, that she fears for. She can imagine his confusion, already, as he reads it – the anger and the disappointment, and the fierce pursuit he will give.

(She imagines Rafael’s reaction, too, when her father tells him what has happened, and that is perhaps the most difficult acceptance to swallow. And, _Rafael_ , she thinks— just another secret that her father had kept from them, or else his own mother, for she had had no brother in that past life, and she has one, now.)

He will hate her, maybe, but Luisa can live with that.

She can live with him _alive_ and hating her, at least until things have settled down and she and Rose can return. There is a divorce to finalise, and belongings to collect, and too many explanations to give, but they will all have to wait, for now. They will have to wait the way that _they_ have had to wait, to be back together. Luisa doesn’t imagine that’s too much to ask for.

“I can wake him up, too,” Rose had told her, before they’d left. “I can make him remember.”

And, Luisa had told her, no.

She can still feel the smoke in the back of her mouth, can still feel the lick of heat against her skin, if she thinks too hard on it. Her father had been a different man, back then, and they were different times. Luisa knows she will struggle with this, but she can handle it, she will. She will handle it better, however, if she knows that her father remains ignorant.

Better that he is angry, she thinks, than he remembers just what he’d done to her.

(She has lived too long, in both this life and the last, with the guilt of believing that she had been somewhat responsible for her mother’s suicide— that she had not been enough to prevent it. She knows exactly what that can do to a person, and it is not something that she would wish on her father, not even if he might deserve it.)

So, she packs a purse with passports and her credit cards, and she takes Rose’s hand, and they walk out of the manor into afternoon sunlight.

Luisa looks back at the old manor house, once, just as they’re about to descend the winding road into the village. It looks ancient, despite the remodelling; it looks aged and tired and cold. It had been her home, but it had been so much more than that. Luisa strains her neck until the manor is almost out of view, and then she lets it go.

 

* * *

 

 

Rose sits at a round table in the centre of their hotel suite in Tampa.

It’s late, and she and Luisa have not yet cleared out the takeout boxes, scattered as they are still around where Rose is sitting. She is carefully trimming a sim card and slipping it into a new phone. Once she’s done, Rose puts the phone down and leaves it to charge. She looks around their hotel suite, modest as it is, and sits back in the dining room chair.

She is dressed for bed, but restless.

In the bedroom, the door left open, she can hear the sound of Luisa’s shower. It has been a steady drone of noise for the past forty minutes, and only when Rose realises the time does she grow concerned. She stands from the table, tucking the bathrobe tighter around herself, and walks until she’s standing just outside of the bathroom door. She wraps her knuckles against it, twice.

“Luisa?” she calls, when there’s no answer.

Her patience is a frail and frayed thing, by now, and Rose barely thinks to stop herself when she tries the door handle.

It opens without catching on the lock, and Rose peers in at the fog of steam, to where Luisa is sitting in the shower. She has her arms around her knees, and her face hidden, and doesn’t appear to have heard Rose or else be aware that she’s here. Rose keeps the door open, when she walks in, and disrobes.

The shower is not huge, but they’d paid for a decent room, and she can fit herself carefully in beside Luisa when she tries.

Luisa does not stir, even as arms are wrapped around her, as Rose draws her into her chest. Her body shakes and shudders and trembles, and Rose holds her for a time, until the water turns cool and the shaking subsides. Rose shuts the water off before it can turn _cold_ , and they sit in the steam, still warm, and quiet.

When Luisa lifts her head, her face is red from both the hot water and her tears.

“Why now?” she asks Rose. “Why did you wait until now?”

Rose presses a hand to dark, wet hair, pushing it away from Luisa’s face.

“I tried, sooner,” she says, and she sounds sorry for it. “I wanted you to remember, sooner, but nothing I did worked. I had to take you back there.” She looks at Luisa and drops her hand from her face. It is a sobering, open look, and Luisa feels it like it’s taking something from her. She breathes all the easier, for it. “Would it have been better, if I hadn’t?”

Luisa thinks on that.

She imagines, all too easily now that she’ll let herself, the life that they could have had, if Rose had left her father for her. Would it have been simpler? She imagines so. Still, she shakes her head, and her hand finds Rose’s. She squeezes their fingers together, threads them through one another, the same way that their fates have.

“No, I’m glad that you did.”

She sniffs and clears the last of the tears from her throat.

“It’s a lot, it is, and it’s not going to be easy, is it? But, I love you, Rose, and I can see that you’ve been hurting for so long. You did so much for us—and I’m not here with you out of obligation, I’m here because it’s _right_. It’s what we deserve. We should have been allowed to have this, back then, and the world ruined that. It took it from us before we even really had it, and now we’ve taken it back.”

Luisa looks at Rose and sees the fire in her eyes finally, effortlessly calm.

She is not a raging, wild thing any longer, but just a single flickering flame – a spot of light in the dark, when it’s most needed. She is like one of many stars in the night sky, like an ages-old map that Luisa can look to, when she needs to find home.

“How many people are that lucky?” Luisa asks. “To be given a second chance, like this.”

Rose’s gaze turns reverent.

“Nobody,” she says, and she looks at Luisa, and sometimes she just cannot believe that she _has her_. “Nobody’s as lucky as me.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, there we have it.
> 
> I can't even tell you how happy I am to close this story off. It has been such a ride to write, these past three weeks, and thank you all so much for sticking with me through it and for all of the feedback. The best thing about this (aside from actually _completing_ it), has 100% been reading all of your comments. I'm so grateful for them!


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